[Corpora-List] corpus of middles and/of TOUGH-constructions

[Adam Kilgarriff]

Jean-Charles,

It's not a corpus of middles you need so much as a large corpus of English
in a corpus query tool that lets you make the relevant searches.  A couple
of minutes on the Sketch Engine found the following adjectives to be the
most common in a simple ADJ TO VERB-INF pattern, which isn't a bad starter
set for your research question.  Of course there is then lots of sorting and
search-refining for you to do.

Self-registration at http://www.sketchengine.co.uk 

Adam

(query on BNC had 159,000 hits, adjs below each had more than 1000 hits in
the pattern; numbers are freq and relative freq of the adj in this pattern
vs the adj in the corpus overall)

able 26084 4313.0 
difficult 9481 2153.5 
likely 8925 1906.0 
possible 6077 886.2 
unable 5658 4524.8 
easy 4976 1695.3 
necessary 4718 1296.2 
prepared 4333 4106.5 
hard 4240 941.1 
ready 3619 1755.5 
important 2843 360.6 
willing 2804 3617.2  
impossible 2794 2010.2 
due 2073 1282.0 
easier 1899 1603.8 
supposed 1888 1793.4 
happy 1661 719.3 
unlikely 1519 1344.9 
obliged 1444 4345.3  
free 1425 323.4 
pleased 1418 1558.6 
keen 1356 1840.1  
reluctant 1322 3319.2  
entitled 1311 2460.2  
best 1254 180.8 
sufficient 1244 1038.7 
anxious 1196 1990.4  
better 1024 144.3 
right 1002

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of J-C Khalifa
Sent: 13 February 2007 16:12
To: CORPORA at UIB.NO
Subject: [Corpora-List] corpus of middles and/of TOUGH-constructions

Hi,

Does anyone out there know of an existing corpus of middles in English 
(i.e. This shirt washes easily) and / or (for of course both seem to be 
related) of a corpus of TOUGH-constructions (John is easy to please, this 
shirt is easy to wash). In both cases, I am especially interested in the 
class of adverbs and adjectives associated with the constructions.

All the very best to you all,

                 Jean-Charles Khalifa

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