Today

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

Taiwan, Dec 2006Kilgarriff, Lexical ComputingSlide: 2

1 political association 4 person in an 4 person in an agreement/dispute agreement/dispute 2 social event 5 to be party to something...3 group of people

1 arity, which will be used to take a party of under-privileged children to D2 from outside. You are invited to a party and after a couple of drinks you d3 tion, we believe politicians of all parties will listen to our views. &equo4 ould be reaching agreement with all parties concerned, as to which events,5 lack people. I have certainly been party to one or two discussions amongst6 . These should be discussed by both parties before entering into the relatio7 presents They had hosted a cocktail party at Kensington palace, for example8 akes. By midnight the end-of-course party is in full swing, but most cadet9 e should be a right for the injured party to terminate the contract. A mana10 by the Safran Peoples ' Liberation Party. This presents the powerful neigh11 s. Ahead I could see the rest of my party plodding towards the final slope t12 cial ethic. The two main political parties - the Tories and the Liberals -13 ritish successes in Perth The small party of British players competing in th14 to help control. One member of the party went to summon the rescue team and15 rket society fashion magazine. The party was held at his flat which was a l16 security and secrecy than any Tory Party Conference : it seems that bootleg

The coloured pens method

Taiwan, Dec 2006Kilgarriff, Lexical ComputingSlide: 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

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Limitation of KWIC analysis

• 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: no

• Instead, look at a Word Sketch from Sketch Engine– a statistical summary of word usage– shows most common collocates

Taiwan, Dec 20069

Taiwan, Dec 200610

Functions of SkE

• KWIC concordance– Sorting, filtering etc

• Word sketch• Automatic thesaurus• Sketch difference

– discriminate near-synonyms

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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”

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From www.teachingenglish.org - a lexical approach activity, based on a story text

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 synonymsd. Some other relationship?e. No relationship?

2. Why has Sketch Engine selected these words, do you think? (2 or 3 sentences altogether)

• Email your answers to simon.tuesday9@gmail.com 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?• http://

science.nationalgeographic.com/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)?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UElKiKVfpA

NEOs

• What can scientists do to prevent an NEO disaster?

• What can governments do?

Vocabulary: pairs

• Students A– p138

• Students B– p139