[Corpora-List] corpora and culture

[Tony Berber Sardinha]

Dear Geoff

> me to wonder whether anyone has used the Freiburg "FLOB and Frown"

Geoffrey Leech has done a comparison of that sort, which he presented during the
last ICAME meeting:

http://www.eng.gu.se/sv/news/icame2002/ICAME_2002abstract_v2.pdf

Geoffrey Leech (University of Lancaster, United Kingdom)
Recent Grammatical Changes in British English: Observation, Description and
Theory

We have been undertaking a study of recent grammatical change in British
English,1
using the LOB and FLOB corpora (representing published English in 1961 and 1991
respectively), as well as explorations of American English and spoken English
corpora
covering the same period. From this study, certain 'facts' come to light:
. From the data studied (mainly written British English), there have been
significant
increases in the use of the present progressive, of semi-modals, of verb and
negative
contractions, of adjectives, of nouns, of noun-noun sequences, of genitives, of
proper nouns, of acronyms, of relative clauses with preposition-stranding
. On the other hand, there have been significant decreases in the use of the
modal
auxiliaries, the passive, of pronouns and determiners, of of-phrases in
competition
with genitives, of wh- relative clauses.
Using these findings, I want to explore the limitations of the validity of
general
statements made on the basis of corpus data. I will refer to three levels
mimicking the
three Chomskyan levels of observational, descriptive and explanatory adequacy. I
will
argue that descriptive and explanatory statements made in corpus linguistics are
always
provisional - but this is true also of any explanatory statement in science.

cheers
tony.
-------------------------------------
Dr Tony Berber Sardinha
LAEL, PUC/SP
(Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
tony4 at uol.com.br
http://lael.pucsp.br/~tony
[New website]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoffrey Sampson" <geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <corpora at hd.uib.no>
Sent: terça-feira, 2 de julho de 2002 10:05
Subject: [Corpora-List] corpora and culture


>
>
> In the corpus linguistics anthology which Diana McCarthy and I are
> compiling for Continuum, one of the items to be reprinted is Geoffrey
> Leech and Roger Fallon's classic study of transatlantic cultural
> differences as revealed by vocabulary in LOB and Brown.
> Geoffrey and Roger point out that the differences may be out
> of date - the corpora are more than 40 years old, and Britain feels
> far more American to me now than it did in the 1960s.  It occurs to
> me to wonder whether anyone has used the Freiburg "FLOB and Frown"
> Corpora to add time-depth to the study - if anything like that has
> been done, our anthology ought to mention it?
>
>
> Geoffrey Sampson  MA  PhD  MBCS
> Professor of Natural Language Computing
>
> School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
> University of Sussex
> Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England
>
> e  geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk
> t  +44 1273 678525
> f  +44 1273 671320
> w  www.grsampson.net
>
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