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

[Roger Shlomo Harris]

Thursday 7th December 2006. London, U.K.



Dear All

Ramesh Krishnamurthy wrote: 

>>> and most hits for contrapunctual were from music texts.

That's surprising. Contrapunctual suggests music which is played erratically 
so that notes are played too early or too late - that's how I play the piano 
after drinking too much beer. Ramesh, of course, meant to write contrapuntal 
which is a genuine music term but he was just testing to see whether we were 
asleep. 

Kind regards,

Roger.
(who periodically moonlights as a proof-reader.)





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ramesh Krishnamurthy 
  To: Diana Maynard 
  Cc: Harold Somers ; corpora at lists.uib.no 
  Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 12:06 PM
  Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Numpties and bennies: Google searches as linguistic evidence


  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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