Corpora: Corpus of English proverbs and set phrases

[Andrew Harley]

At 04:20 PM 24/01/2000 +0100, François Maniez wrote:
>       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
>be used as an aid for reading comprehension by  helping learners of English
>as a second language to spot allusions to such  proverbs or expressions.  
>Thanking you all in anticipation   François MANIEZ
>Département de Langues  Étrangères Appliquées

I agree with Oliver and others that this would indeed not be a "corpus"; in
fact it would be far closer to being a "dictionary".

Apologies for banging my lexicographic drum again, but besides the question
of terminology, there is a more serious issue with regard to using
appropriate tools for the desired task. A fair bit of research in corpora
is devoted to extracting information (e.g. grammatical patterns,
selectional preference patterns, collocation patterns, semantic relations)
from corpora, when there may be available dictionary resources (themselves
based on analysis of corpora but manually filtered by lexicographers and
supplemented by additional knowledge) that can already provide far richer
and more accurate resources than any fresh corpus analysis is likely to
supply.

Such corpus analysis can of course be justified in the interests of
research and improving corpus analysis mechanisms, but is often not the
most efficient way to approach a specific practical task.

For François' particular task, a dictionary would be very useful, either in
itself (if it had example sentences, and if it was written with learners of
English in mind) or as a list of phrases to search for examples of in a
corpus.

Andrew Harley
Systems Development Manager - ELT Reference
Cambridge University Press

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