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

jasper holmes jasper.holmes at UCL.AC.UK
Wed Feb 4 11:28:27 UTC 2004


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Hanks [mailto:hanks at bbaw.de]
> Sent: 03 February 2004 14:57
> To: lexicographylist
> Subject: Re: [Lexicog] corpus + cognitive linguistics. WAS: Interesting
> lexical discoveries
>
>
> 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.
>

I suspect not, because this use of total is (I think) only common in
American English. Over here we would say 'I wrote my car off' (at least *I*
would).

Jasper

>
> Patrick
>




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