Corpora: corpus evidence that runs counter to intuition?

[John Williams]

Sebastian Hoffmann wrote:

> I'm looking for "nice" examples where corpus evidence (radically)
> runs counter to intuition (of a native speaker) or to standard
> perception of the language. Of course there are many findings in
> corpus-based studies that could not have been established by
> introspection - but I'm looking for the kind which would result in a
> "wow - I wouldn't have thought that!"-reaction from the average
> language user. ;-)

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Dear Sebastian,

In the Bank of English, by far the most frequent meaning of 'bash' (any
part of speech) is 'party' whereas I think most native speakers would
intuitively go for 'hit, beat up' (informal). This could be explained by
the large news media component of the BofE ('bash = party' is very much
a 'media' word) or maybe it's 'really' the most frequent meaning
(whatever that means).

The large news component also explains things like the main verb
collocates of 'radio station' being things like 'capture' or 'take
over', rather than the more intuitive 'listen to' or 'tune into'.

And also there are the well-known cases like 'give', where the
delexicalized meanings ('give a smile', etc) are more frequent than
'hand over, present'; and 'see = understand' which is more frequent than
'see = perceive with eyes'.

Hope this helps.

John Williams, ex-Cobuild lexicographer


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