[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Fanny Meunier]

Hi there,

Your question puzzled me and I googled "a 
worshop" (7840000 hits) vs "an workshop" (21500 hits).

It struck me that they were quite a lot of German refs such as
Sie bitte an workshop at ... (= sthg like: please see workshop at ...)
schicken Sie bitte eine Email an workshop (= sthg 
like: please send an e-mail to workshop at ...)
direkt per E-Mail an workshop at ... (= directly via e-mail to workshop at ...)

Food for thought...

All the best,
Fanny



Le 13:13 7/12/2006,Diana Maynard écrit:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>No problem, it was my fault for being too hasty also.
>I agree entirely.
>Another little story....
>
>A non-English colleague asked me the other day 
>if the correct phrase was "a workshop" or "an 
>workshop". I was quite surprised at the 
>question, especially as the colleague said he 
>had searched for both on Google as he was not 
>sure which to use, and found more occurrences of 
>the former, but still many occurrences of the 
>latter. He also said that to him the 
>pronunciation of the latter sounded better 
>(which I found odd as I actually found it quite 
>difficult to pronounce, but perhaps that's a non-native speaker thing).
>I checked on Google and he was right about the occurrences.
>
>Are there any times when it would be OK to use 
>"an" before a word beginning with "w"?
>I'd be interested to know what the BNC or other corpora show up on that.
>Diana
>
>
>Ramesh Krishnamurthy wrote:
>>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
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20061207/fb99fe10/attachment.htm>