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6. Grammar

Corpora for teaching grammar

Sample activities

 

Activity 1

Contractions

Look at the following sentence and answer the questions below:

Tom is not here.

  1. How can the verb and the negative particle in this sentence be contracted?
  2. Is there only one possibility?
  3. If not, what is the other option?
  4. Which of the two is more frequent?
  5. What does the frequency depend on?
  6. Based on your analysis of the corpus evidence, can you draw up any rules regarding the use of contractions in English?

Use BNC View to answer these questions. Write your answers in a file and submit it.

Have any facts you have just discovered surprised you?

Activity 2

Any

  1. What are the rules describing the use of any? Try to remember them and note them down.

Rule 1: ………………………………………………………

Rule 2: ………………………………………………………

……..: ……………………………………………………….

……..: ……………………………………………………….

  1. Which use is most frequent?
  2. Study the use of any in the BNC. I recommend the use of BNC Online as it automatically trims the number of corpus citations to 50 random hits, which is a manageable number to study during an activity like this one. Of course, for a serious research project you would need more citations than that.
  3. Based on your analysis of the corpus evidence, can you draw up any rules regarding the use of any? Are they different that you the ones you jotted down at the beginning of this activity?

Write your answers in a file and submit it.

Activity 3

Between and among

  1. What is the rule differentiating between these two prepositions? Is it strictly followed?
  2. Can you find three citations in the BNC which demonstrate that the rule does not always apply?
  3. Do you expect that the rule is followed more strictly in the academic context?

Check your intuition. Go to the site of Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) http://micase.elicorpora.info/ and search the corpus (click on Search MICASE Online now) for the two prepositions.

  1. Study the citations. What are your observations?
  2. Can you draw up any rules which explain more accurately the uses of between and among?

Write your answers in a file and submit it.

After you have explored this problem, compare your results with the following activity:
http://micase.elicorpora.info/micase-kibbitzers/2-among-or-between

Follow up

Can you propose any rules about how less and fewer are used?

Activity 4

Conditionals

The rules concerning the conditional are usually drawn up according to the following criteria. Fill out this table for the types of conditionals you know (the number of rows in the table should not be any indication).

 

Name

Verb forms

(tense-aspect marking and modals)

Time reference

Meaning

(attitude to likelihood)
If-clause Main clause

Now study conditionals as they are used in real life. Do they follow the rules you have just sketched up? Which rule does each citation refer to? Note down interesting (unusual) examples.

To study the citations follow the procedure below.

For this activity you will use a spoken corpus of English created in the Backbone project. This project gives access to spoken corpora in several languages.

  • Go to the following site: http://134.2.2.16:8080/backbone-search/.
  • Study the languages in the pull-down menu in the middle of the screen. Choose English and press the button Load Corpus.
  • Click on the Co-occurrence tab. In the Search words window type if and then click on Search! button.
  • Interview sections appear on the screen, each containing highlighted occurrences of if.
  • Study the citations. You can also highlight one section and click on Go to section button on the red strap running across the screen, over the citations. You will get access to the whole interview, with a possibility of viewing the video or playing the audiofile. You may also have access to some learning resources which have been attached to this interview.
  • To go back to the citations press the back button on the red strap.

Write your interesting examples in a file and submit it. If you have time, explore the Backbone project site in more detail.

Activity 5 (optional)

Passive

In English there are two forms of passive: be+PP and get+PP.

  1. Which one is more frequent?
  2. Does the frequency depend on different registers or is there and other factor influencing the choice between be and get.

Use any corpus tool you know to answer these questions.

Tip: for this search you have to use POS (Part of speech tags)