[Corpora-List] extracting questions

[Rebecca Rock]

Dear Linguists,

For my undergraduate dissertation I am wanting to investigate questions of the 'how x' framework in written data only. To do this I recently downloaded the BNC corpus, but as I am new to corpora, I am a little confused. For the purpose of explaining my dilemma I will use the example 'how big'.

Typing 'how big' into the 'phrase query' tool yields lots of instances where 'how big' is being used other than in questions. My solution to this was to use the 'query builder' to state that the sentence with 'how big' had to have a question mark in it. In the 'scope node' I stated '<text>' so the information would be extracted from written texts only. In the 'content node' I stated (using the SGML tool) that I wanted to look for instances where the information I wanted was occurring within the same sentence (<s>). directly below this I put the 'phrase query' 'how big' and directly below this I put the 'word query' '?'. When I clicked 'ok' , however, I never got passed the 'searching' stage.

In summary then, I am wanting to know how to investigate questions of the 'how x' framework using the BNC corpus. A typical (perfect) example would be: 'How big was the fish that ran away?'

I hope you can help
Rebecca Rock


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20021024/4e567a01/attachment.htm>