Institutt f or litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk
HJEMMEEKSAMEN - TAKE-HOME EXAM
2009 HØST / AUTUMN
1 side / page
ENG4107: CORPORA IN LANGUAGE RESEARCH: THEORY AND METHOD
3 dager / days
7.12. - 10.12.2009
Besvarelsen skal leveres i Fronter (blyant.uio.no) 10. desember 2009, senest kl 12.00
Submit your paper in Fronter (blyant.uio.no) 10 December 2009, by 12.00 noon
Answer all questions in 1 and EITHER 2a OR 2b. Question 1 counts 30% and Question 2 70% of
your final mark. Proper reference must be given to any source that has been used. Your answer should
not exceed 10 standard pages, though your list of works consulted may come in addition.
1
Define and discuss the following terms / concepts with reference to relevant literature on the
subject. Illustrate your discussion with examples.
i.
ii.
iii.
2a
Multilingual corpus
The importance of structural mark-up
Introspection vs. corpus linguistics
Some verbs such as grow, prove and turn can describe a change in state when they are
followed by an adjective, e.g. grow old, prove fatal, turn pale. (In grammar books these verbs
are sometimes called "resulting copular verbs".) On the surface these verbs seem similar to
one another, but there is reason to believe that they may differ with regard to meaning,
collocational preferences, semantic prosody and register distributions. Using the British
National Corpus (CQP-edition http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/bnc/BNCquery.pl?theQuery=search&urlTest=yes – ilos/bnc), try to
find similarities and/or differences between the three verbs grow, prove and turn when they
are followed by an adjective.

Use the search pattern: {base form of verb} _{A}
Your essay must include a formulated research question, an account of your findings, and a
consideration of the research procedure. (Remember that it may be necessary to use a random
sample.)
2b
Explore the use of the words pause and break in terms of one or more of the following
variables:
 collocation
 grammatical patterns
 genre variation
 regional variation
 translation patterns
Select a corpus which is suitable for your chosen topic. Your essay must include a formulated
research question, a justification for your choice of corpus, an account of your findings, and a
consideration of the research procedure. (Remember that it may be necessary to use a random
sample.)