Wednesday 12 September 2012

New Presentations uploaded

Just to let you know ... for your information ... to whom it may concern:

In the subsection of my Methodologies and Approaches in ELT website called Data Driven Learning, I have uploaded the two presentations I gave during the summer:

Feedback more than welcome.

James Thomas

Saturday 8 September 2012

Mixed marriages

English, as we all know, has both Germanic and Romance language roots. To quote two topic sentences from a Wikipedia page:

  1. All Germanic languages are satellite-framed languages.
  2. On the other hand, all Romance languages are verb-framed. 
In satellite-framed languages, verbs of motion contain require particles to express direction and how the verb is performed, whereas in verb-framed languages, such meanings are encoded in the verb itself. 

This partly accounts for the divide between Germanic and Romance vocabulary in English being multi-word and single word respectively.


Wednesday 5 September 2012

Blame the tagger


Kennel is a verb?

In the UK WaC corpus, the phrase,  hunt kennels is tagged as N + V, which serendipitously turned up in the wordsketch of “hunt”. Kennel is tagged as a verb 500 times. The 170 kennels are mostly NNS (plural noun), i.e. wrongly tagged. Ditto the 96 kennelling, which are mostly gerunds, sometimes present participles as adjectives.  However, the 94 kennelled are mostly verbs, and mostly passive but sometimes simple past where they have a normal animate subject: someone kennelled their type of dog, pack.

This hunt set out to discover if kennel is used as a verb, and to defer to Rosemary Moon’s comment, you can verb any noun. Wordnet no doubt has a list of house nouns, many of which are as likely to be as verbable as kennel. To house is hardly an uncommon verb.

The odd thing about hunt kennels being tagged as N + V is that kennelling is not performed by inanimate subjects. And the tagger should take this into consideration. The unimaginative morphology of English that sees 's' as the third person singular ending and the third person plural ending is clearly at the heart of this problem. 

The tagger is also an inanimate non-sentient robot, so the buck stops with the programmers of taggers who are both animate and sentient beings.