Today Listening test Corpus linguistics talk, Part 3 News task NEOs Life on Mars

Taiwan, Dec 2006 Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Slide: 2 4 person in an agreement/dispute 1 political association 4 person in an agreement/dispute 2 social event 5 to be party to something... 3 group of people The coloured pens method

Taiwan, Dec 2006 Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Slide: 3 Age 2: limitations as corpora get bigger: too much data 50 lines for a word: read all 500 lines: could read all, takes a long time 5000 lines: impossible

Taiwan, Dec 2006

Why do corpora keep getting bigger? (anyone?) Improvements in technology – Price of storage is going down – Speed of access is going up Representativeness – Small corpus  many examples of common words, maybe – But not enough examples of unusual words

Lexical distribution What’s the most common word in English? What % does it make up of a whole corpus? The 100 most common words make up __% of all the words in a corpus? The 7500 most common words make up __% Answers: – The, 5%, 45% and 90% So: – you need massive corpora, if you want to really represent rare words properly

8 Limitation of KWIC analysis A s corpora get bigger: too much data – 50 lines for a word: read all – 500 lines: could read all, takes a long time – 5000 lines: no Instead, look at a Word Sketch from Sketch Engine – a statistical summary of word usage – shows most common collocates

Taiwan, Dec

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Functions of SkE KWIC concordance – Sorting, filtering etc Word sketch Automatic thesaurus Sketch difference – discriminate near-synonyms 11

12 Lexical approach to language learning Lewis (1993) and Schmitt (2000) say – the vocab is stored in the brain in collocations – Bacon is stored near eggs – 蛋 is stored near 炒飯 – scotch is stored with whisky Saying strong car or powerful tea or broken house seems very “foreign”

13 From - a lexical approach activity, based on a story textwww.teachingenglish.org

SkE homework this week Choose 5 words from either source Check the words in the Thesaurus of Sketch Engine Look at the top 4 “synonyms” and try to answer: 1.Are the 4 words a.Really synonyms? b.Antonyms (=opposites)? c.Near synonyms d.Some other relationship? e.No relationship? 2.Why has Sketch Engine selected these words, do you think? (2 or 3 sentences altogether) your answers to before Sunday

News task Write in your exercise book Write 3/4 paragraphs (NOT numbered) –Introduction –Body –Conclusion You should include the answers to the following questions: –Where? When? What? Who? Why? –But DO NOT only give direct answers!

Recipes Dictation Chicken Kiev In groups: either –Find a recipe you like, on the web –Or make your own recipe and write it down

Planets How many are there? m/science/space/solar-systemhttp://science.nationalgeographic.co m/science/space/solar-system Groups: p137 questions

NEO questions What does NEO stand for? What damage do you think a large NEO would cause if it collided with Earth? What happened in the two previous hits (mentioned in the article)? UElKiKVfpAhttp:// UElKiKVfpA

NEOs What can scientists do to prevent an NEO disaster? What can governments do?

Vocabulary: pairs Students A –p138 Students B –p139