SECTION A [36 marks]

This section contains questions on using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

1. What search string is needed to carry out the following searches in COCA? Just write the search in the answer boxes, nothing else.

 

1. A search for all instances of the lemma GROW. [1]

 

1. A search for synonyms of sad. [1]

 

1. All instances of the word change functioning as a verb. [1]

 

All sequences of ‘in the X of a Y Z’ where X = any noun, Y = any adjective and Z = any noun. [3]

 

1. All forms of the verb get followed by an –ing [2]

 

1. ‘What a(n)’ followed by any noun. [2]

 

1. The base form of all verbs beginning with the consonant cluster pl-. [2]

 

2. What is the most frequent item belonging to the following word classes in the whole of COCA? Just write the word in the answer boxes, nothing else.

 

1. Reflexive pronoun [2]

 

1. Plural noun [2]

 

1. Modal verb [2]

1. Comparative adjective [2]

3. List the top four singular nouns in the following sections of COCA. (You should write four words in each box, nothing else.)

 

1. Science fiction/fantasy [4]

Click here to enter text.

1. Academic (Humanities) [4]
2. Academic (Medicine) [4]
3. News (Money) [4]

 

4. In the whole of COCA, what are the most frequent collocates of the following words and phrases?

 

1. Most frequent singular noun collocate of the word blue occurring in a span of 4 to the right of the node? [2]

1. Most frequent adjective collocate of the word feels occurring in a span of 1 to the right of the node? [2]

1. Most frequent plural noun collocate of Obama occurring in a span of 4 to the right and 4 to the left of the node? [2]

SECTION B [20 marks]

This section contains questions on using BNCweb.

5. What is the most economical query syntax required for the following searches? Just write the search in the answer boxes, nothing else.

 

1. All adjectives ending in -ly. [1]

1. Any word ending in -ful. [1]

1. All nouns ending in -sation or -zation. [2]

 

6. Using the ‘frequency list’ function, answer the following questions:

 

1. What is the most frequent man’s first name beginning with B in the whole BNC? [2] Click here to enter text.
2. What is the most frequent city beginning with C in the whole BNC? [2]

Click here to enter text.

1. What is the most frequent interjection in the whole of the BNC? [2]

 

7. Use ‘standard query’ and ‘distribution’ to find out about the distribution of the lemma CHAT (use Simple Query Syntax help if you need to). Answer the following questions.

 

1. Is the verb chat more common in ‘fiction and verse’ or ‘spoken conversation’? [2]

1. Is the verb chat more common in written texts by males or written texts by females? [2] Click here to enter text.
2. Is the noun chat more common in ‘fiction and verse’ or ‘spoken conversation’? [2]

8. The table below shows the distribution by gender of the word darling in the demographically sampled part of the spoken component of the BNC. What are the values for A, B, C and D? [4]

 

The following distribution was found:
Sex:
Category	No. of words	No. of hits	Dispersion (over speakers	Frequency per million words
Female	2,264,094	A	102/559	B
Male	1,454344	C	44/509	D
total	3,718,438	541	146/1,068	145.49

 

SECTION C [6 marks]

This section contains questions on using AntConc.

Load An Outcast of the Islands (in SunSpace Unit 5) into AntConc and answer the following questions (remember to ‘treat all data as lower case’).

9. What is the most frequent word in the novel? [1]

 

 

10. What is the most frequent 3-word cluster/n-gram in the novel? [2]

 

 

11. Using the default wild-card settings, what query syntax is needed to search for all words ending with the sequence –ms? [2]

 

12. Is the concordance plot below for Willems or Lingard? [1]

 

 

SECTION D [32 marks]

This section tests your knowledge of concepts in corpus linguistics and language pedagogy. It consists of a series of definitions. You have to supply the words or phrases which match the definitions and write them in the box

 

The typical grammatical patterning into which a word or grammatical construction enters. [2]

 

 

 

The number of words either side of a search item to set the parameters when searching for co-occurrence patterns. [2]

 

A large corpus which attempts to represent the general usage of a language through the careful selection of a cross-section of texts. [2]

 

The tendency for certain words to be related to a particular area of evaluative or attitudinal meaning, even when the meaning of the word itself appears to be evaluatively neutral. [2]

A measurement of the proportion of lexical words to function words in a text. [2]

 

An approach to learning in which students ‘discover’ rules and probabilities from the corpus examples they find. [2]

 

A process to enable direct comparisons of frequency to be made when comparing texts and corpora of different sizes. [2]

 

The onscreen display of a concordance in which the search word is centred, with co-text on either side. [2]

 

The term used to describe a corpus used as a background against which to compare findings from another corpus (particularly in relation to the analysis of keyness). [2

 

The canonical form of a word. [2]

 

The process by which each word in a corpus is assigned a label according to which word class it belongs. [2]

 

 

1. Click here to enter text.

 

The relationship between an individual word and a set of semantic categories. [2]

 

 

This class of words is sometimes referred to as grammatical words and consists of pronouns, prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, etc. [2]

 

A word which is found significantly more often in one corpus when compared with a reference corpus. [2]

 

A measure of the rate of occurrence of a word or phrase across a particular file or corpus. [2]

The default statistical measure of keyness in AntConc. [2]

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