Corpora: the thing

[Peter Hohenhaus]

Hi,
I have worked on things that seem to be related, namely noun phrases
not only containing THING as a simple head (plus the sorts of
determiners you list) but as part of a type of compound which I have
dubbed 'dummy compounds'. Another 'dummy'-head, of similar status as
THING, by the way, is -BUSINESS. There's an article on this
forthcoming in October (Peter Hohenhaus, "Dummy-Compounds - An
Overlooked Type of Word-Formations in English and German", in:
Proceedings of the CUTG, Keele, 1999, Peter Lang Publishers). If
you can read German (or get somebody to read it for you) you could
also have a look at my doctoral thesis (P. Hohenhaus:
Ad-hoc-Wortbildung - Terminiologie, Typologie, Theorie kreativer
Wortbildung im Englischen, Frankfurt/Bern/etc.:Peter Lang, 1996 -
esp. chapter 5, see 'dummy compounds'), which already covers a
good part of the phenomena in question (with lots of examples with
a lot more context than the article); in both you'd find more
bibliographical background. A slightly older Article which may be
of particular interest to you is: J. Fronek: "THING as a function
word", in: LINGUISTCS 20, 1982, 633-654;
A newer work which might be interesting (more for the discourse
elements "stuff like that" etc.) is:
WHALES, CANDLELIGHT, AND STUFF LIKE THAT: General Extenders in
English Discourse
Maryann Overstreet, University of Hawaii, Manoa
(Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics)

Only received this tip recently myself - have not had a chance to
look at it. But it seems to be of related interest.

None of the above are strictly speaking corpus-based (although the
latter might be ...as I said I haven't looked at it yet), at least
not on electronic copora. However, I am more than keen on
exploring the subject with corpus linguistics means further. So,
if you hear of more of this, please let me know (and I'll let you
know if things develop, as planned, more in that direction at this
end ...)
Hope this is useful so far.

Best wishes

Peter Hohenhaus


On Thu, 8 Jun 2000 10:51:24 -0500 (CDT) Marco Antonio Esteves da Rocha
<marcor at cce.ufsc.br> wrote:

>
> Dear all,
>
> I am looking for material on noun phrases such as "things" and related
> forms such as "this/these/that/those/such (sort of/kind of) thing(s)". I
> think "stuff" and perhaps "line" and "game" in some discourse environments
> could be also included.
> Material may be bibliography in general (preferably corpus-based
> studies of course) and computational handling solutions (if there are
> any). Downloadable material for free would be particularly useful, as our
> library is not too rich and funds for the acquisition of books and
> subscription of periodicals are short.
> Thanks in advance,
> Marco Rocha
> marcor at cce.ufsc.br



----------------------
Peter Hohenhaus
@bradford.ac.uk