A use of articles

Is it more probable that we say a noun of a noun or the noun of a noun?

This pair of queries answers the probability question quite dramatically.

[word = "the"][tag = "N.."][word = "of"][word = "a"] 50,100 hits in the BNC
[word = "a"][tag = "N.."][word = "of"][word = "a"] 6,653 hits in the BN

An examination of the situations in which the a N of a N is used is an important step, since 6,653 is not a number of hits that can be dismissed in the same way we dismiss the 22 hits for seperate as opposed to 11,868 for separate.




These are rather bland queries, not permitting any other elements in the noun clauses.

Tectogrammatical Level Annotation

Tectogrammatical is not only a new word for me, but a new concept.

Web economy bullshit generator

dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator

own your emotions

This use of the word feels new to me:

Student ownership of the learning event. (in reference to scaffolding)
Near the beginning of the film Shortbus, the relationship counsellor speaks of owning emotions.
A colleague once complained of feeling sidelined and that he didn't feel any more ownership of the course we were co-teaching.

It has the idea that something abstract is yours, that you had some part in its creation or how it came into being, that you own it so you can do what you like with it and it's your responsibility to do so as no-one else is going to do it for you, etc etc etc. You hear people speak of owning their emotions.

On another level, it's an example of how native speakers have to come to terms with new words (e.g. wimp) or new uses of words (wiked) and how NSs acquire this.

But I don't see much support for it in the corpora I have been looking at. Anyone else?

Sketch Engine workshop

At Eurocall 2008 in Hungary, I will be giving a 3 hour workshop at Eurocall introducing the Sketch Engine for pedagogical purposes. This concordancer is used by a great number of people and for a wide range of reasons from lexicography to classroom language teaching. What I most like about it is the fact that it is totally web-based. Oh and the speed - it can process complex queries on huge corpora online in seconds and less.

An automatic collocation writing assistant for Taiwanese EFL learners

An automatic collocation writing assistant for Taiwanese EFL learners: A case of corpus-based NLP technology - Computer Assisted Language Learning

Correcting Written Work

Linguist List - Web Resource Listings

Linguist List - Web Resource Listings
An annotated portal

Concordance and corpora- training from the ICT Guides

Concordance and corpora- training from the ICT Guides

BNCweb manual: Collocations

BNCweb manual: Collocations

Collostructional analysis

Collostructional analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "(i) it measures not the association of words to words, but of words to syntactic patterns or constructions; thus, it takes syntactic structure more seriously than most collocation-based analyses" ....