Corpora: Absolute Participle

[Alex Chengyu Fang]

Marcin,

Absolute participial constructions are not very common in representative
corpora such as Brown, LOB, and ICE, occurring roughly once or twice per
thousand sentences. Assuming that there are 70,000 sentences per million
words, you'd expect to get just a bit more than a hundred examples. Since a
majority of these would be restricted to the verb "be", you'd need larger
corpora to have a good variety.

But these constructions should be relatively more frequent in fictional
English and it may well be worth your while to contact the TOSCA group in
the University of Nijmegen. They have a corpus of English fiction that has
been syntactically analysed.

You can certainly retrieve absolute constructions from POS-tagged corpora
but since the N (not NP) +Participle construction is hugely frequent you'll
have to spend a lot of time picking out what you want, especially so if you
intend to work with BNC.

Alex

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Alex Chengyu Fang
Senior Research Fellow
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics
University College London
Wolfson House, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, UK
Tel: 44 (0)171 504 5026
Fax: 44 (0)171 383 0752
WWW: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/alex/home.htm
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