[Corpora-List] Numpties and bennies: Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

Hi Diana
Sorry about the brevity of my previous email.
I didn't mean to be rude, just in a hurry as usual...

But I was raising a genuine concern of mine. An experience last year: 
challenged in
my daughter's school playground by 2 mothers who had heard of my 
involvement with
writing dictionaries, I was asked to resolve their dispute: "is 
unpunctual a word, can I
say unpunctual".

It was not listed in any of the printed 6 or 7 native-speaker (US and UK) and
learner's dictionaries I looked at. There were 15 occurrences in Bank 
of English (5 in British
Magazines, 4 in Independent, and a few one-offs), so below the normal 
threshold for inclusion
in Cobuild at the time.

But I found 4320 hits on Google (43,100 today!
- so has its usage increased, or has Google's trawl just got 
bigger?), mostly entries in
online dictionaries (based on each other?)... but also 9000+ for 
impunctual, 5000 for non-punctual,
500 for nonpunctual, 400 for contrapunctual, 11 for apunctual, and 7 
for anti-punctual...

When I looked closer at the hits, most of the hits for impunctual 
were from a 1913 USA dictionary,
most of the hits for non(-)punctual were (technical use) from 
linguistics texts, and
most hits for contrapunctual were from music texts.

So I told the mothers that unpunctual was a valid word form
(ie created according to valid derivational rules)
but that it wasn't very widely used.

PS I've just noticed a discussion on unpunctual at
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=105391

Best
Ramesh



At 09:36 07/12/2006, Diana Maynard wrote:
>Yes, I should have been more explicit, I didn't mean in all cases!
>Diana
>
>Ramesh Krishnamurthy wrote:
>>
>>>>I guess this demonstrates the power of the internet over the BNC 
>>>>as a corpus.....
>>
>>For rare events, events post-1994, and events beyond British 
>>English, perhaps...
>>There's still the problem of reliability...

Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences, 
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; 
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp

Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/ 
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