Corpora: Corpus of English proverbs and set phrases

[Oliver Mason]

François Maniez writes:
>       I wondered whether anybody on the list knows  about an online corpus
>available for download and consisting of English proverbs and/or set
>phrases. The objective is to turn the corpus  into a data base that could
> [...]

Andrew Harley replies:
> Instead of a corpus, you might want to consider using an existing
> dictionary which gives examples of idioms in context, e.g. the Cambridge
> International Dictionary of Idioms. This is available as SGML data for

Sorry to appear pedantic, but how would a `corpus of proverbs' look
like?  I would think no such thing could exist, just like you couldn't
have a corpus of past tense sentences.  Instead, you have a corpus of,
say, written fiction, which you can use to compile a list/database of
proverbs, but that would not be a corpus, but a, erm, list or
database (or even a dictionary).

My understanding of `corpus' is that it is some more or less
homogeneous collection of utterances, but not `filtered', ie if you
selected all sentences containing proverbs you would end up with a
list, not a (sub)corpus.

Do other people think different/the same?

Oliver

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