[Corpora-List] Incidence of MWEs

[Andy Roberts]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, Adam Kilgarriff wrote:

> Bob Amsler says:
>
>> I have found published dictionary's judgments as to what constitute MWEs
>> to be both dated and biased against declaring MWEs to exist.
>> ...
>> Take an MWE such as "pencil sharpener". Most dictionaries don't ...
>
> UK dictionaries on my shelf do list "pencil sharpener" (Oxford D of E 98,
> LDOCE 95, Macmillan E D 02).  US ones (Random House 1987, M-W online) don't.
> Moral is clear.
>
> US dictionaries are ***way, way*** behind UK dictionaries in corpus use.  UK
> dictionary publishers lead the world in corpus development and use (with NLP
> lagging behind).  OUP and Longman were prime movers in developing the BNC,
> and OUP is now on the point of launching its billion-word corpus of English.
> Collins-COBUILD was the great pioneer in the 1980s.  Macmillan was first
> user of my very own word sketches (corpus analysis software).
>

I think we should remember that dictionary publishers are often working
to the contraints of traditional paper printing. There is clearly a
contraint in terms of physical space. Therefore, regardless of how many
MWEs the editors know of, there will be an inevitable culling in order
to deliver a 'pickupable' product.

I can't speak for others, but I know that Longman American dictionaries
are corpus driven too. You'll find 'pencil sharpener' in Longman
Advanced American Dictionary (the US equivalent of LDOCE).

Andy Roberts