[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[William Fletcher]

I too was amazed that a number of _an workshop_ hits may be from native speakers.  

Google advanced search specifying English as language and UK as domain drastically reduces the hit count for the an-variant.  With these filters it is immediately obvious which usage predominates, by a factor of 20,000:1.  (Some webpages with German text did slip by the filters; search engines often mislabel the language of a document, and have no way to identify multilingual text.)

All the examples of _an w*_ I found in the BNC seem to be _an'_ = _and_.

Regards,
Bill Fletcher



---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:58:46 +0000
>From: Diana Maynard <d.maynard at dcs.shef.ac.uk>  
>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Google searches as  linguistic evidence  
>To: Fanny Meunier <fanny.meunier at uclouvain.be>
>Cc: corpora at lists.uib.no
>
>Indeed. I looked through some of them and there were some like that, but 
>many genuine ones too
>Diana
>
>Fanny Meunier wrote:
>> 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*@... (= 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*@... (= directly via e-mail to 
>> workshop at ...)
>>
>> Food for thought...
>>
>> All the best,
>> Fanny
>>  
>>
>>
>