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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thursday 7th</FONT> December 2006. London,
U.K.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear All</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ramesh Krishnamurthy wrote: </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>>>> and most hits for contrapunctual were from music texts.</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>That's surprising. Contrapunctual suggests music
which is played </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>erratically </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>so that notes are played too early or too
late - that's how I play </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>the piano </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>after drinking too much beer. Ramesh, of
course, </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>meant to write contrapuntal </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>which is a genuine music term but he </FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2>was just testing to see whether we were </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>asleep. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Kind regards,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Roger.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>(who periodically moonlights as a
proof-reader.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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<BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=r.krishnamurthy@aston.ac.uk
href="mailto:r.krishnamurthy@aston.ac.uk">Ramesh Krishnamurthy</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=d.maynard@dcs.shef.ac.uk
href="mailto:d.maynard@dcs.shef.ac.uk">Diana Maynard</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A
title=harold.somers@manchester.ac.uk
href="mailto:harold.somers@manchester.ac.uk">Harold Somers</A> ; <A
title=corpora@lists.uib.no
href="mailto:corpora@lists.uib.no">corpora@lists.uib.no</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, December 07, 2006 12:06
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [Corpora-List] Numpties and
bennies: Google searches as linguistic evidence</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>Hi Diana<BR>Sorry about the brevity of my previous email.<BR>I
didn't mean to be rude, just in a hurry as usual...<BR><BR>But I was raising a
genuine concern of mine. An experience last year: challenged in <BR>my
daughter's school playground by 2 mothers who had heard of my involvement with
<BR>writing dictionaries, I was asked to resolve their dispute: "is unpunctual
a word, can I <BR>say unpunctual". <BR><BR>It was not listed in any of the
printed 6 or 7 native-speaker (US and UK) and <BR>learner's dictionaries I
looked at. There were 15 occurrences in Bank of English (5 in British
<BR>Magazines, 4 in Independent, and a few one-offs), so below the normal
threshold for inclusion<BR>in Cobuild at the time.<BR><BR>But I found 4320
hits on Google (43,100 today! <BR>- so has its usage increased, or has
Google's trawl just got bigger?), <B>mostly entries in <BR>online dictionaries
(based on each other?)</B>... but also 9000+ for impunctual, 5000 for
non-punctual, <BR>500 for nonpunctual, 400 for contrapunctual, 11 for
apunctual, and 7 for anti-punctual...<BR><BR>When I looked closer at the hits,
most of the hits for impunctual were from a 1913 USA dictionary,<BR>most of
the hits for non(-)punctual were (technical use) from linguistics texts,
and<BR>most hits for contrapunctual were from music texts.<BR><BR>So I told
the mothers that unpunctual was a valid word form <BR>(ie created according to
valid derivational rules)<BR>but that it wasn't very widely used. <BR><BR>PS
I've just noticed a discussion on unpunctual at<BR><A
href="http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=105391"
eudora="autourl">http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=105391</A><BR><BR>Best<BR>Ramesh<BR><BR><BR><BR>At
09:36 07/12/2006, Diana Maynard wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">Yes, I should have been more
explicit, I didn't mean in all cases!<BR>Diana<BR><BR>Ramesh Krishnamurthy
wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite"><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">I guess this demonstrates
the power of the internet over the BNC as a
corpus.....</BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>For rare events, events
post-1994, and events beyond British English, perhaps...<BR>There's still
the problem of reliability...<BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE><X-SIGSEP>
<P></X-SIGSEP>Ramesh Krishnamurthy<BR><BR>Lecturer in English Studies, School
of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET,
UK<BR>[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ;
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766<BR><A
href="http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp"
eudora="autourl">http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp<BR><BR></A>Project
Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): <A href="http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/"
eudora="autourl">http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/</A> </P></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>