[Corpora-List] List of mass and count nouns?

[P Resnik]

I think Adam's corpus-related idea makes perfectly good sense, but as
another angle you might also consider checking whether the noun is a
descendant of the synset

substance (the real physical matter of which a person or thing consists)

in WordNet.

  Philip



On Dec 19, 2007 7:00 PM, Adam Kilgarriff <adam at lexmasterclass.com> wrote:

> Scott,
>
> This is an interesting task to do from a corpus:
>
> take a large English corpus
> for each of the most frequent N nouns of English, find:
>   overall frequency
>   how often in singular
>   how often in plural
>   how often with each of
>     a/an
>     some + singular
>     some + plural
>     numbers
>
> It won't be too hard to identify, from this data, what nouns are
> count-only and which mass-only, and of course there'll be lots in between
> (including lots where polysemy is part of the issue)
>
> We've been addressing related questions, and support this kind of
> exploration, in the Sketch Engine (http://www.sketchengine.co.uk)
>
>
> Best
>
> Adam
>
>
>
> On 19/12/2007, scott crossley <sacrossley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Dear Corpora List Members,
> >
> > I am trying to locate an electronic list of mass and count nouns in
> > English. I am looking at the development of hypernymic relations in L2
> > learners of English and would like to compute the amount of mass and count
> > nouns used by L2 learners as they relate to basic level categories and
> > superordinate categories in language use.
> >
> > Any help would be appreciated!
> >
> > --
> > Scott Crossley, Ph.D.
> > Linguistics/TESOL
> >
> > Department of English
> > Mississippi State University
> > http://www.msstate.edu/dept/english/esl.html
> > (662) 325-2355
> >
> > Institute for Intelligent Systems
> > University of Memphis
> > http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/iis/
> > _______________________________________________
> > Corpora mailing list
> > Corpora at uib.no
> > http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> ================================================
> Adam Kilgarriff
> http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk
> Lexical Computing Ltd                   http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
> Lexicography MasterClass Ltd      http://www.lexmasterclass.com
> Universities of Leeds and Sussex       adam at lexmasterclass.com
> ================================================
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> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
>
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