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In this section of the Library, you are asked to fill in the log as you proceed. For each chapter in BYU: BNC/COCA you'll find additional questions and tasks, or you are asked to note your findings in the log. Try to be conscious of your own learning process and bring up your own thoughts and experiences in your answers. Again, feel free to make any comments and notes when you want to add something that is not in the scope of the provided questions.
Think about the questions and the feedback in this exercise. Can you draw some general conclusions concerning the knowledge that can be obtained from a corpus through a simple search?
Consider the steps of corpus investigation in relation to the warm-up exercise just above. Which stages were you supposed to take by yourself? How did they seem to you? Did you find something to be difficult, confusing, easy or simple?
Summarise what you learnt from this exercise - about the corpus and about the language items.
What meanings for come around were you able to find? Which expressions did you try to look up in the corpus? How did it work out? What did you learn?
In your own words, try to explain what POS-tags are and how they can be used in corpus searches. Illustrate with examples.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Write six sample sentences using research and verbs found in the corpus. You may extraxt the samples from the corpus or make up your own examples. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
What search strings did you try for each expression? Was it difficult to decide what to try with? Which one of the strings were the most successful? Illustrate by examples, and give also the corrected forms of the expressions. -throw doubt on: -give way for: -do decisions about: Other comments?
Consider the three adjectives that were examined with the corpus. Based on your observations, what can you say about them? Make generalisations about their use and meaning. Take a look at the results sorted by percentage: do the strong collocates in each table have something in common, and how do they differ from the collocates of the other two adjectives?
Choose sample sentences from the corpus that best illustrate the differences between the adjectives that collocate with increase and those that collocate with decrease. Explain your choices. Four samples is enough if you can justify them well.
Type the search strings you used and at least two words you found for each of the word families in the text field below. The words can be ones that you didn't know before but want to remember, or ones that stroke you as odd or surprising. Try also to conclude what they mean. -analyse -estimate -identify -occur
Make a summary of what you now know about prefixes and suffixes, and production of new words in English. Run also some corpus searches with prefixes and suffixes to give examples.
Try to describe the concept of register in your own words. What is it and how can its understanding be of help to you as a language learner? How can the registers be examined through the BNC interface? Run some searches and decribe your experiences.
Pick one register or subregister and try to obtain as much information on it as you can. Give account of the searches you tried and justufy them well. If something does not seem to work out, tell that too.
When you have provided your answers, enter your e-mail address in the assigned field and save the log by sending it to yourself. Make sure that the e-mail address is correct before clicking the Send button!
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