Martina Zelikova
18th May 2006
20 examples
1. Register ___ federation
First I put “register” in the Keywords, lemma and PoS verb. In the right context I put “federation”, 2
tokens and PoS noun. There was an empty result. Therefore, I put 5 tokens and the result was 1 hit:
“competition is open to all British racers registered with the British Ski Federation and aged” What exactly were
you searching for? Did one hit provide adequate data to base your conclusion on?
2. Register at / in
I thought that “at” or “in” were used as prepositions with register and federation. So after my search
mentioned above I wanted to know the usage of prepositions of at / in / with. I repeated the process
but I left the right context empty, just chose PoS preposition and 1 token. There were 1235 hits. I
used the frequency – “in” (283), “with”, “for”, “as” are the most frequent with over 100 hits. “At”
had only 57 hits. I sorted my search according the prepositions and looked at the context they are
used in.
Register at school, college, University, centre, department
Register in year, place (California, territory), in his name,
Register with a club, doctor, company, agency, association, authority, council, commission etc.
Good conclusion. I wonder if there was any overlap, i.e., if the same nouns appeared with different
prepos.
3. adverb + horrified
First I put “horrified” in the Keywords, lemma and PoS adjective. Then I specified the left context
by choosing token 1 and PoS adverb. There were 53 hits and I used the frequency to see the order. I
wanted to stress “how much I was horrified”. Therefore “absolutely” was the most appropriate from
the search, it was second with 8 hits; then “utterly” with 2hits, “totally, really, genuinely” all with 1
hit. GOOD
4. Pet dog
I was not sure if I could1 specify “pet” with “dog” when I was translating an article about a dog
which was part of the family.
I put “pet” in keywords but I did not specify it as I was not sure if it is a noun or and adjective. In the
right context I put “dog” and token 1. There were 56hits. I wanted to see the PoS so I clicked on
“view options” and ticked “tag”. It defined pet as noun but 4 cases of adjective. GOOD
5. Breeding station
We use “chovna stanice” in Czech which is connected to dogs and I had to translate it to English. I
tried “breeding” in keyword and “station” in the left context, PoS noun and token 1. There were 6
hits but I needed to know the context so I click on the “node”. Going through the extended text, I
1
sequence of tenses
found out that breeding station relates to crop, plants, fish, duck and poultry. When dealing with
specialized fields, you might find Bootcat more useful than the BNC.
6. Kennel
My search for “kennel” resulted in 178 hits but I had to distinguish between various contexts. I was
looking for kennels/kennel as a place where you can put your dog when you go abroad or where you
can buy a pedigree dog. I found a lot of examples of the place where your dog is cared for when you
go abroad.
However, I was not sure about buying a puppy there so I tried to specify my search. In the right
context I put “puppy” (noun). There were 3 hits but only one was quite suitable. I looked at the
context: “But help may be at hand in the form of Holly, a Dalmatian which is the middle of a phantom pregnancy. She
has all the symptoms, but no pups of her own to feed. Holly’s owners are hoping she’ll adopt the orphans. She says that
they’re going to leave Holly in a kennel to see if she’ll accept the puppies as her own -- she’s very broody. Some of the
kennels young residents are lucky -- they 're being looked after their real mother … Now it 's hoped that these
hungry youngsters will soon have a mother of their own too“.
So I put “breed” (verb) into the left context, token 15. The search resulted in 4 hits. The one most
convincing was: “unja Triomfator won the open bitch class, both these animals are owned and bred by Miss Gruter,
whose kennel is situated in Zunderdorp. Both animals were the only Rottweilers in the open class to gain a V rating“.
Then I put “breeding” into the left context, token 10. There were 4 results and the following quote
represents the best one: “Probably one of the best-known characters in Swedish Rottweiler history is Mrs Gerd
Hyden, who is an international judge and breeds Rottweilers under the Saltsjoborg prefix. Her kennel has won the
Hamilton Award for the Swedish Kennel who produces top quality breeding”.
These are good examples of iterative searches – trying out different approaches, and focusing your criteria as you go.
7. Breed club
During my search I came across breed club. So I wrote “club” into the Keywords and specified the
left context with “breed”. There were 14 hits but mainly it concerned a club as association that
kennels join. So what were actually looking for?
8. preposition + page
There were 2437hits. I looked at the frequency. I chose second level, position 1L and both attributes
lemmas. There were about 40 different prepositions. Preposition on is the most frequent (1603), then
to (208), of (202), from (80) etc. I wanted to look at the context so I sorted my search according to
the left word and examined the most frequent prepositions.
On – to locate – e.g see something, appear, find it on page 6, I am / it is on page,
To – turn, from-to, back to, get to, refer to,
Of – specify the page/pages e.g. number, amount, area = couple, dozen, column, bottom,
Good
9. open ___ page
I put “open” in the Keywords, and specified the right context as “page”, token 3. There were just 18
hits so I adjusted the tokens to 5. Then there were 39 hits. I sorted my search according to the right
words.
I examined the lines and the preposition “at” is the most frequent in this context. Good.
10. click on / at button
There were 41 hits. Click is often connected with the mouse button without any preposition. Then
there were various buttons e.g. the OK button, close button, envelope button which go together with
the preposition “on”. To click with the preposition “on” occurred 15 times.
11. click + at
Because of the previous search I was wondering in what context the preposition “at” is used. I
limited the search by token 2. The search resulted in 15 hits. However, there are only 7 hits with the
required context (and 3 of them were from 1 source). The rest was connected to noise, i.e. “he heard a
door click at 1.45”. So the search was not very convincing. Funny thing about mouse buttons, is that
when the BNC was finished, it wasn’t such a “popular” activity as it is today.
12. adjective + care
I needed to translate “starat se s laskyplnou peci”. I put “care” in the Keywords and adjective in the
left context, token 1. There were 5461 hits. I sorted them according to the frequency to see what
adjectives are used with care and to see how often they are used together. I could use intensive, great,
special, personal (all of them over 100 hits), but also extra, particular, loving (75hits), good etc. I
decided for loving as it was the closest one to the Czech text. Good
13. have appearance
I put “appearance” in the Keyword and “have” in the left context; I specified it as a verb and token 2.
It resulted only in 3 hits, e.g.: “players are known to have received appearance fees from different sources“. So I
had to change my search and leave “have” without specific PoS. Then, there were 63 hits.
It was always used with definite article and of – to have the appearance of. Yes, a fixed phrase. Good
finding.
14. therefore + comma
I was not sure if I should write a comma after therefore at the beginning of the sentence. I put
“therefore” in the Keyword. There were over 20.000 hits. So I sampled the lines into 1.000 hits and
sorted the lines according to the right to see the punctuation. There were more than 70 examples of
“therefore” at the beginning of a sentence which was followed by a comma and only about 20
examples without a comma. Surprisingly only 13 and half pages out of 50 were with commas. So
even though “therefore” is in the middle of a sentence, there is no comma. Surprising, isn’t it! Also,
speaking of commas, you should write 1,000 not 1.000 in English!
15. bitch
I was translating an article about a female dog. However, fena, the Czech equivalent, can be also
translated as fenka or fenecka which doesn’t sound so rude. I put “bitch” in the keywords and
specified the left context with “dog”, token 10. There were 57 hits which persuaded me that it is
commonly used.
16. message as a verb
I came across “message” as a verb but I was not sure if it is correct so I put “message” in the
Keywords and verb as PoS. There were 14 hits, mostly used as gerunds, e.g. “The first service,
multimedia messaging, is targeted for delivery in late 1993 early 1994 by US West , using Oracle 's existing database ,
messaging and distributed system technology”. So message is not used as a verb in the BNC. … for the
same reason as 11 above.
17. spelling 21
First I put “twenty-one” into the Keywords, unspecified PoS and there were 537 hits. When I wrote
two separate words in the phrase there were 569 hits. So both forms are all right. What about the
difference between alright and all right?
18. Break head [I don’t know it either]
There were only 18 hits when I put “head” in the Keywords and “break” into the left context, token 3.
However, none of them was related to the context of medicine. Try Bootcat.
19. Backpack as a verb
I was wondering how frequent the usage of backpack as a verb is. I put “backpack” into the
Keyword and PoS a verb. There 58 hits, all of them used in –ing form e.g. “But whether you’re
backpacking with all your camping gear” and sometimes it was a noun e.g. “backpacking tent”.
So I put “backpack” into the Phrase, left PoS verb. Then there were 37 hits, some of them were good
e.g. “you could backpack the route or stay” but some of them were used as a noun e.g. “leaving my
backpack in a kibbutz” I’d have expected “to go backpacking”, but no!
20. verb + refund
I put “refund” in the Keywords and PoS noun, I specified left context by a verb, token 3. There were
145 hits and I had to go through them. The verbs used are:
Shop, bank etc – give, make, offer and refuse a refund,
Customer – claim, demand, get, obtain and received a refund
Good
Martina, I like the fact that you use the data well to get to your conclusions, most of which are
sound. And that you focus and adjust your search criteria as new information comes to light.
Good work.