USING CONCORDANCERS TO EXPLORE ENGLISH GRAMMAR

A.  Classifying words in context

Many words in English have the same form as nouns and verbs, e.g., house, button, garden, progress, permit, record.  How is part of speech determined in such cases?  To answer this question, look at the usage of the word record as it occurs in the Brown corpus and Collins CoBuild.  Find at least 20 instances of record in both corpora, circle the number of strings that contain instances of record as a verb.

B.  Adverbs or Adjectives?

How does Barry explain the difference between adverbs and adjectives?  Some scholars claim that there is a usage issue relating to the use of adverbs vs. adjectives, as in doing well vs. doing good, with the latter considered informal.

Find doing well and doing good in MICASE and answer the following questions:  

• Which form is more common? 

• Is there any correlation between the use of doing good and the nature of the speech event in which it occurs?  How is doing well used?  How would you characterize the nature of the speech even in which doing well occurs?  Can you see any patterns emerging?

MICASE classifies its data by speech event.  The speech events are as follows:  ADV -- advising session; COL -- colloquia; DIS -- discussion section; LAB -- lab sections; LEL -- large lecture; LES -- small lecture; MTG -- meetings;OFC--office hours; SEM -- seminars;SGR -- study groups; TUT -- tutorials.

C.  Problem with -ly Degree Words

One finds that completely, absolutely, extremely, excessively, actually, and totally are generally classified as adverbs in most grammar books even though they fit the qualifier frame as in:

The young man seems_________handsome.   The mysterious woman next door is _____________beautiful.

Using Collins CoBuild/the Brown corpus and the Great Books Concordancer look for occurrences of totally and actually.  Find examples in the data obtained where totally is used as a qualifier (i.e., modifying an adjective or another adverb).  Do the same with actually.  When are these two words used as qualifiers?  What did you find?