[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Yorick Wilks]

Apologies!!
Careful rereading shows me you can see that perfectly well!
Sorry
YW


On 7 Dec 2006, at 12:50, 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 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
>>>
>>>
>>
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