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Dear Vlado<br><br>
The Cobuild dictionary (3rd ed 2001) gives research<br>
as "N-UNCOUNT also N in pl", <br>
i.e. it is uncountable (ie not used with a/an in singular form);<br>
but is also used as a plural noun.<br><br>
Bank of English evidence:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">
<font face="Courier New, Courier">Query is "researches/NOUN"
[*Note from RK: to the extent that the POS tagging is accurate...]<br>
Term 1 in your query has been selected as the node<br><br>
272 matching lines</blockquote><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">
Corpus Total Number
of Average Number per<br>
Occurrences
Million Words<br><br>
brbooks
76
1.8/million<br>
newsci
10
1.3/million<br>
strathy
19
1.2/million<br>
indy
29
1.0/million<br>
guard
30
0.9/million<br>
usbooks
23
0.7/million<br>
usacad
4
0.6/million<br>
usephem
2
0.6/million<br>
brmags
24
0.5/million<br>
brspok
9
0.4/million<br>
times
23
0.4/million<br>
bbc
8
0.4/million<br>
econ
5
0.3/million<br>
oznews
8
0.2/million<br>
brephem
1
0.2/million<br>
wbe
1
0.1/million<br>
sunnow
0
0.0/million<br>
usspok
0
0.0/million<br>
npr
0
0.0/million<br>
usnews
0
0.0/million</font></blockquote><br>
Of course, a lot of English texts on the Web are also written by
non-expert English speakers,<br>
which will affect the distributions...<br>
I wonder if the proportions are the same for other languages?<br><br>
Best<br>
Ramesh<br><br>
At 16:50 07/12/2006, you wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Yet Another Story:<br><br>
After showing to one of my students how to use Google to verify <br>
validity of some lexical and syntactic constructs, a couple weeks later I
<br>
was presented with significant Internet evidence that
"research" is a <br>
count noun and "in many researches" is a valid phrase.<br><br>
--Vlado</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></body>
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