Using a corpus

[koster]

As a teacher I often ask myself questions that would be easily answered by querying a corpus, e.g. which is most frequent, "easier" or "more easier"? ... what about "easiliest" or "most easily"?

At http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-451/kulick.html I found the answer to the first question (3210 occurrences of <easier>, 19 occurrences of <more+easy>).

How do I go about using a corpus myself to find answers like these? Where can I find a corpus that I can use?

Thanks for any suggestions,
Laurence

[malcolm]

There are loads of exercises you can do with a corpus.

for example, students can look for words that end in "ing". The corpus will give them phrases that contain "ing" words. Students can then deduce or revise rules for the use of verb + ing.

you can also try combinations like "remember to do something" and "remember doing something". again students work out the rules by studying the phrases the computer generates.

they could type in something like the word "married" and compare how it's used; eg to get married, to be married, he's married to, etc

If you're looking for a corpus, Collins Cobuild should have something

good luck

Malcolm

[ICAL_Pete]

You may also be interested in these 2 articles Concordancing and Concordancer about where to find corpora, how to best exploit them, and which software to use with them.