Using Corpora to Teach Grammar Montclair State 使用语料库教语法蒙特克莱尔州立.pptVIP

Language Corpora:Seeing Real English Grammar What’s wrong with these examples? Conjunctions: Marsha ordered a double latte, for she had a long night ahead of her. He is always boasting; however, no one seems to mind. Sentence types: The wolf wailed in an awful way. The jolly Santa smiled cheerfully. Subordinate clauses: Joan grimaced noticeably when Eric began his speech. Lorry’s father loves his garage in which he builds models of prehistoric animals. The Problem Linguistics aims to describe real language, not rules made up by ‘language police’ Even good grammar textbooks cannot represent real language. (They’d weigh a ton!) Even good grammar textbooks tend to ‘bend’ the language to get the grammar rules across. Problem with Textbook Examples Stilted language Marsha ordered a double latte, for she had a long night ahead of her. Mixing of genres in a single sentence loves his garage in which he builds models of prehistoric animals. conversational written One Solution Look at large amounts of real language - the corpus linguistics approach Enabled by computers with large memory capacity (But the Oxford English Dictionary was built on the same principle) Types of Corpora a corpus is a collection of written or spoken language Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol The New York Times online The Santa Barbara corpus of spoken English a representative corpus includes samples from the various types of language usage The Brown Corpus The British National Corpus MICASE The Brown Corpus: 1st representative corpus The Brown corpus consists of 500 text samples Each sample consists of just over 2,000 words Types of language usage include: A. PRESS: REPORTAGE (44 texts) H. MISCELLANEOUS: GOVT (30 texts) B. PRESS: EDITORIALS (27 texts) J. LEARNED (80 texts) C. PRESS: REVIEWS (17 texts) K. FICTION: GENERAL (29 texts) D. RELIGION (17 texts) L. FICTION: MYSTERY (24 texts) E. SKILL AND HOBBIES (36 texts) M. FICTION: