Corpora: future expressions in the BNC

[David Lee]

Dear Ute,

If you're interested in progressive *aspect* (as opposed to simply all
progressive *forms*), try the following regular expression-based rule:


[pos="VB.*" & pos!="V.*G"] [pos!=
"AT.*|D.*|N.*|C.*|I.*|J.*|V.*|.|\.\.\."]{0,4}[pos="V.*G|VVGK"]

(this was written for XKwic/CQP and the CLAWS C7 tagset version of the
BNC (which doesn't have portmanteau tags), but you can easily adapt it
for your own purposes).

By specifying a "BE" before the actual -ing participle (while allowing
for intervening adverbials), this search algorithm to a large extent
succeeds in weeding out detached participials, gerunds, and relative
functions of the present participle, leaving us with progressive,
aspectual uses of verbs.

Of course, since you're only interested in future uses of the
progressive, you'll need to thin down the results even further or the
adapt the above rule.


Dave.

P.S. I fully agree with Chris Tribble's earlier message: for more advanced
research, I suggest using WordSmith or the excellent Unix-based XKwic.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
David YW Lee              **************************************
Dept of Linguistics        *   Stop the narrowing of minds   *
Lancaster University     *   Affirm the diversity of life         *
Lancaster LA1 4YT      ***************************************
England, UK.

Email: david_lee00 at hotmail.com
Homepage: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/leey/dave.htm
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>From: "Ute Römer" <ute.roemer at uni-koeln.de>
>To: <corpora at hd.uib.no>
>Subject: Corpora: future expressions in the BNC
>Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 19:03:44 +0100
>
>Hi Corpus Linguists!
>
>I'm wondering whether one of you could possibly help me with a research
>project on future expressions in English. I'm looking for several
>structures in the spoken part of the British National Corpus and I have
>some problems to find types like "VERBing", "will be VERBing" and so on.
>Is there a possibility to find all present progressive forms without doing
>a separate query on every single verb, i. e. is it possible to insert some
>kind of "place marker" indicating "base form of lexical verb"?
>
>Thanks a lot for your help!
>
>Many Greetings from Cologne,
>Ute Römer
>
>ute.roemer at uni-koeln.de

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