[Lexicog] corpus + cognitive linguistics. WAS: Interesting lexical discoveries

[Patrick Hanks]

Murray:

> Would another hypothesis be that you are working with a skewed corpus?
> Journalism has its own peculiar style and genre, where the use of
abstracts
> in general (and, especially, of abstracts as subjects of verbs) would be
> much more common than in everyday speech or in many other written genres.

Good point.  BNC is _supposedly_ "balanced and representative" (and
certainly
it contains a wide variety of text types, not just journalism.) However,
within BNC,
the "[[Abstract Entity]] total {QUANT [[Numerical Value]]}" sense has a
skewed distribution in favor of journalism.

I expect -- but have not checked -- that large spoken corpora may favor the
insurance sense of total/V.


Patrick




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