kitchen table math, the sequel: the joy of corpus studies, part 2

Monday, April 23, 2012

the joy of corpus studies, part 2

more from Biber and Conrad:
[I]n fiction writing and newspaper writing, the verb say is much more frequent than any other lexical verb; in conversation, the verbs go and know are as frequent as say, and get is more frequent than any of those three verbs; while in academic writing, the only especially frequent verb is BE.
Corpus Linguistics and Grammar Teaching

1 comment:

Catherine Johnson said...

I think it's time for me to bite the bullet and order a copy of Biber & Conrad's book.

Only problem is: I'm torn between the 1000-page book and the 500-page Student Grammar.

I'm also intensely interested in "Real Grammar."