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<p class="MsoNormal">Hi Nigel<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">1. I have no idea how GoogleFight obtains its hit counts (or the relationship between these and standard Google search results).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">2. I too felt that the figures you obtained for "in breach of his standard of care" and "in breach of his duty of care" were way too high. I would expect very few 7-grams to
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">have such a high frequency, and certainly not the ones you selected.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">3. Therefore, I did a standard Google search on these strings, and got:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">"in breach of his standard of care"= About 3 results (0.26 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">"in breach of his duty of care"= About 28,700 results (0.23 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[NB several legal documents relating to Scots law on 1<sup>st</sup> page of hits]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[In the process, I also spotted: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breach_of_duty_in_English_law">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breach_of_duty_in_English_law</a>]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">4. This made me re-examine your email: “My law students tend to mix up standard and breach, so I keyed in "in breach of his duty of care" vs (in legalese basically erroneous) "in breach of his standard of care". Yet GoogleFight manages
to make this a majority decision: 523,000 to 221,000.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">a) Did you mean that your students mix up ‘standard of care’ and ‘duty of care’ (rather than “standard and breach”)?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">b) Which phrase had 523,000 and which 221,000?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">5. As someone with no specialist legal knowledge at all, but substantial experience of English corpus analysis and lexicography, I would expect in Google (i.e. general language) counts :<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">a) ‘standard’ to be more frequent than ‘duty’ <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">a) ‘standard of care’ to be more frequent than ‘duty of care’. For example, I could happily talk about the ‘standard of care’ I received when I broke my arm
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">recently, but would be wary of talking about ‘duty of care’, because that sounds like a legal phrase.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">6. I think you have complicated the issue in the exact wordings of your search items, because:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">a) for me “breach+duty” is a strong collocation, whereas I find it much more difficult to accept “breach+standard”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">b) I would see ‘breach’ as the main signal of legal domain in these phrases<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">7. Anyway, my curiosity led me to do a few more standard Google [and corpus] searches:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">standard= About 1,470,000,000 results (0.15 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">duty= About 437,000,000 results (0.10 seconds)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[<a href="http://corpus.byu.edu/">http://corpus.byu.edu/</a>: BNC; COCA<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">standard=12659(+breach=1), 40504(+breach=6)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">duty=7861(+breach=324), 14986 (+breach=52)]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">"standard of care"= About 7,760,000 results (0.13 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">"duty of care"= About 1,620,000 results (0.11 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">breach+standard+care= About 16,600,000 results (0.04 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">breach+duty+care= About 20,700,000 results (0.12 seconds) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">hope this helps…<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ramesh Krishnamurthy<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Visiting Academic Fellow, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Room: NX01. Tel: 0121-204-3812. <br>
Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project): <a href="http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/">
<span style="color:blue">http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/</span></a> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Project Investigator, GeWiss (Volkswagen Foundation) project:
<a href="http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/">
<span style="color:blue">http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/</span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 19:21:39 +0800<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">From: njbruce <<a href="mailto:njbruce@hku.hk">njbruce@hku.hk</a>><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Subject: [Corpora-List] Google Fight - database & authenticity?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">To: mtmarathon2011 <<a href="mailto:mtmarathon2011@fbk.eu">mtmarathon2011@fbk.eu</a>>, "<a href="mailto:corpora@uib.no">corpora@uib.no</a>"<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> <<a href="mailto:corpora@uib.no">corpora@uib.no</a>><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Cc: Ondrej Bojar <<a href="mailto:bojar@ufal.mff.cuni.cz">bojar@ufal.mff.cuni.cz</a>><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Can anyone tell me how GoogleFight comes up with colossal numbers for even highly discipline-specific expressions? My law students tend to mix up standard and breach, so I keyed in "in breach of his duty of care" vs (in legalese basically
erroneous) "in breach of his standard of care". Yet GoogleFight manages to make this a majority decision: 523,000 to 221,000. When I use my 2 million word discipline specific (UK case report) corpus, I get zero matches for the erroneous form.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Having said that, the 2nd line of the Wikipedia entry on "Standard of care" has the line :"Whether the standard of care has been breached is determined by ... etc." - so this is an easy slip to make. But 221,000 entries?! I thought
about including a fun link to GoogleFight for my ESL Law students to play around with, but am now wondering how useful that might be.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Any suggestions/insights welcome.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Nigel Bruce<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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