Corpora: Corpus of English proverbs and set phrases

[Ute Römer]

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Oliver Mason <oliver at clg.bham.ac.uk>
An: CORPORA at hd.uib.no <CORPORA at hd.uib.no>
Datum: Donnerstag, 27. Januar 2000 17:16
Betreff: Re: Corpora: Corpus of English proverbs and set phrases


>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
>
I think Oliver is right. All the existing English (computer) corpora I know
are (more or less representative) collections of huge amounts of written or
spoken language (or both). Of course you can search for English proverbs (e.
g. in the British National Corpus) butyou have to start a phrase query for
each single proverb you are interested in.

Greetings, Ute

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