4. Vocabulary

Specific meanings

Choose one of the words below:

dirty

interesting

eat

predict

mistake

clothes

List its synonyms.

After you have done so, use the thesaurus to find more synonyms and other related words.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Find your word in Longman Language Activator. Study all the information included there.

Choose three synonyms or other related words which are new to you. Find their citations in the British National Corpus.

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Now let’s try a different tool. Choose another word from the list above. Go to the following site:

http://www.wordandphrase.info/

and clink the link Frequency List.

Type your word in the box in the top left corner of the screen and click the Search button. Study the information on the page.

Choose three synonyms or other related words which are new to you. Click on them and study their citations in the British National Corpus provided in the bottom right box.

Choose three interesting examples illustrating the meaning of the (three) studied words. Copy them to the word processor. Prepare a handout which you can share with the rest of the class.

Continuous, unceasing , ceaseless, incessant

The words above are similar in meaning but they differ significantly in their semantic prosody. You are going to look up these words in the British National Corpus. Study these words in context and discover the differences in their semantic prosody.

This time we will consult the British National Corpus through a different interface called View. Go to the following site:

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

Type the four words in the left-hand-side window separated by slashes. Click on the Search button. You can click on each of the words in the upper right-hand-side window to study its citations .

Compare the information you have discovered with the information provided by dictionaries:

http://www.ldoceonline.com/

http://oxforddictionaries.com/?attempted=true

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Is the information provided in the dictionaries sufficient?

Are there any other words which have the same meaning? Use the Word and Phrase to find out. Copy all the synonyms in the box below.

Juice

What is the basic meaning of the word juice? Are you familiar with its other meanings? Look up the meanings in Longman dictionary:

http://www.ldoceonline.com/

Look up the word juice in a corpus in order to refine your understanding of its different meanings. Go through the concordance lines while noting different meanings, each followed by one or two examples. Here is the procedure for looking up the word in a corpus.

Go to the following address

http://view.byu.edu/

This portal gives you access to many different corpora. For this task we will consult the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

Press the link to the CCAE, then press Enter at the introductory page.

You can now consult the corpus. Type the word juice in the Word(s) box in the left window and click on Search.

You can see the frequency of the word in the right top window. This frequency is very high.

Click on the word juice. You get the concordance lines in the right bottom window. Study them for a few minutes.

You have probably found out that the concordance lines do not reveal anything interesting about this word. So let’s try to limit our search in order to have a better access to less typical meanings. In the Sections box in the left window find the category Magazines: sports. Click on it and click on the Search button again. New frequency information occurs in the right top window. Click on the word juice again to study concordance lines. Hopefully this time the citations reveal less typical meanings of the word.

Is the word juice used with the same meanings in British English? Click on the BNC button at the top of the page. In the Word(s) box type in a phrase with the word juice that frequently occurred in the American corpus. Have you found any examples in the BNC?

Juice

What is the basic meaning of the word juice? Are you familiar with its other meanings? Look up the meanings in Longman dictionary:

http://www.ldoceonline.com/

Look up the word juice in a corpus in order to refine your understanding of its different meanings. Go through the concordance lines while noting different meanings, each followed by one or two examples. Here is the procedure for looking up the word in a corpus.

Go to the following address

http://view.byu.edu/

This portal gives you access to many different corpora. For this task we will consult the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

Press the link to the CCAE, then press Enter at the introductory page.

You can now consult the corpus. Type the word juice in the Word(s) box in the left window and click on Search.

You can see the frequency of the word in the right top window. This frequency is very high.

Click on the word juice. You get the concordance lines in the right bottom window. Study them for a few minutes.

You have probably found out that the concordance lines do not reveal anything interesting about this word. So let’s try to limit our search in order to have a better access to less typical meanings. In the Sections box in the left window find the category Magazines: sports. Click on it and click on the Search button again. New frequency information occurs in the right top window. Click on the word juice again to study concordance lines. Hopefully this time the citations reveal less typical meanings of the word.

Is the word juice used with the same meanings in British English? Click on the BNC button at the top of the page. In the Word(s) box type in a phrase with the word juice that frequently occurred in the American corpus. Have you found any examples in the BNC?

Arrive

1. What prepositions follow the verb arrive?

2. Verify your knowledge/intuitions in the corpus

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

3. In the search box type the word arrive followed by an * sign (arriv*). This will allow us to search for all the forms of arrive (arrive, arrives, arrived, arriving and arrival). Click on the collocates box. In the POS drop down menu choose prepositions (Prep.all). In the context windows choose 0 in the left window and 2 in the right window. The corpus will look for all the instances of the word arrive and its inflectional and derivational forms followed by a prepositions in the span of two words to the right.

4. Look at the prepositions in the top right window. Can you find anything interesting? Click on any preposition and study the examples. Copy them to the window below.