[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Alison Duguid]

Looks like a case of  shifting or wobbly priming to me, as Michael Hoey 
has pointed  out education has a key role in  priming and the problem 
might be caused by doubt in a situation when fears about correctness are 
uppermost because shifting identities are at work. The questioner is 
really asking someone who is perceived to be a native speaker of a  
variety (academic/correct) in which he felt he was not a native, what 
would be the acceptable version.
 Also look how many hits you get for 'nucular', and then look again at 
the co-texts and contexts. Quantitative needs to be tempered with 
qualitative research.


Geoffrey Sampson wrote:

>An amazing experience I had a few years ago was being asked in all
>seriousness by one of my part-time researchers whether "a bad egg" or
>"an bad egg" was correct.  With another part of his time he worked for a
>company alongside another man who had to do some documentation and
>insisted that the correct form was "an bad egg".  So far as I could make
>out, this other man (who, like my researcher, was as I understood it a
>native speaker) thought he had learned a rule that "a" v. "an" depends
>on whether the following noun begins with a vowel, and this explicit
>rule overrode in his mind what must surely have been a large weight of
>experience implying that it is not the following noun, but the
>immediately-following word, that matters.  The third party was quite
>sure that only "an bad egg" would do in writing; my researcher was
>dubious, but felt he needed my professorial authority to contradict his
>colleague.  This seemed to me very striking counter-evidence against the
>idea that native speakers "know" the rules of their language.
>Comparable misunderstandings of the a/an rule might perhaps explain
>sporadic cases of "an w..." written by people who would surely _say_ "a
>w..." when they were speaking spontaneously, without thinking about
>language issues.
>
>Geoffrey Sampson
>
> 
>............................................................
>     Prof. Geoffrey Sampson  MA PhD MBCS CITP ILTM
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>     author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"
>
>     Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
>     Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England
>
>     www.grsampson.net     +44 1273 678525
>............................................................
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