Grammar
- Random-ise: Milton's Paradise Lost, -ize And -ise Verbs
This is part of an investigation I've been doing into the use and spelling of -ize suffix verbs and their spelling (-ize or -ise) in British English. For more details, related posts and the methods I've used, see the -ize / -ise page. John...
- Google Search Results: Treat With A Large Pinch Of Salt
When deciding whether a certain construction or phrase is natural English or not, it makes sense to check how it is actually used. One way of doing this is to use corpora, but they can be quite complicated for laymen like me to use. And as we have...
- Finding Language In Context - 'academic' Words
King's College, Cambridge - photo by Andrew Dunn at Wikimedia Commons This post helps you find collocations and examples in context of the most common so-called academic words, based on The Academic Word List (see below). You can: look...
- Random Thoughts On The Expression Vanishingly Unlikely
At language blog The Stroppy Editor, Tom Freeman takes the Guardian to task for the way it treats part of a submission (for a government consultation process on child poverty) from a team led by Alan Milburn, "ex-Labour minister turned coalition...
- Q & A Is 'outwith' A Word?
It most certainly is, although you might get funny looks if you use it outwith Scotland. A detailed description of its usage would be outwith the scope of this Quick Answer, and might well be outwith my area of knowledge. And should my employers happen...
Grammar
Finding language in context - Google site search
Let's say you've found a new word. You've looked it up in a dictionary and found an example sentence or two. Perhaps you've also found what other words it collocates with. (I'll be looking at some online tools to find collocates, in another post). What you'd like to do now is to see how it's used in context.
One possibilty is to use a corpus, ("a collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer. Plural - corpora" - Leoxicon), but these can sometimes be difficult to use, and when they include spoken language, the grammar is occasionally "non-standard", let's say. The British National Corpus is easy to use, but be careful with examples from spoken language.
Another way is to do a simple Google (or other) search. The Internet is one enormous corpus if you think about it, although no linguist has "collected" these examples. But a simple search can bring up a lot of irrelevant material, and again you're not really assured of grammatical correctness.
What I like to do is a Google site search of trusted newspapers and other websites, which are in effect small corpora, or look in Google Books, where the material has been edited and proofread, so is likely to be grammatically correct.
With a Google site search, you put in your search term, (which I like to put in inverted commas so that it only looks for these words when they are together), followed by site: and the address of the website (without http://). So if I wanted to find examples of highly unlikely on the Guardian website, I'd enter:
- "highly unlikely" site:www.guardian.co.uk
To make things easier, I've put together a simple tool to look up words and expressions on various newspaper sites, etc. Just enter a word or expression into the Entry Box and click on one of the links. (Try it with the examples). I'll probably add some more sites to it later.
A note on books - clicking on Google Books searches all books digitised by Google. There is also a facility for doing an advanced search of Google Books here. You can for example choose to search only modern books. Project Gutenberg is a digital collection of out of copyright books, so it has all the classics but few modern books.
| British quality press | British tabloids | American press |
| The Guardian | The Daily Mail | New York Times |
| The Independent | The Daily Express | Washington Post |
| The Telegraph | The Mirror | Herald-Tribune |
| The Times | The Sun | Chicago Tribune |
| The Financial Times | San Francisco Chronicle | |
| The Economist | Los Angeles Times | |
| Miami Herald | ||
| Wall Street Journal | ||
| Huffington Post | ||
| Time Magazine | ||
| Enter expression: | ||
| Broadcasters | ||
| BBC | BBC News | |
| Magazines | ||
| National Geographic | Geographical (UK) | Discover Wildlife (BBC) |
| History Today | History Extra (BBC) | History Channel |
| New Scientist | Scientific American | Science Focus (BBC) |
| Books | ||
| Project Gutenberg | Google Books | |
Links
- Leoxicon - a blog dedicated to the use of corpora in the teaching of English to foreign students.
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- Random-ise: Milton's Paradise Lost, -ize And -ise Verbs
This is part of an investigation I've been doing into the use and spelling of -ize suffix verbs and their spelling (-ize or -ise) in British English. For more details, related posts and the methods I've used, see the -ize / -ise page. John...
- Google Search Results: Treat With A Large Pinch Of Salt
When deciding whether a certain construction or phrase is natural English or not, it makes sense to check how it is actually used. One way of doing this is to use corpora, but they can be quite complicated for laymen like me to use. And as we have...
- Finding Language In Context - 'academic' Words
King's College, Cambridge - photo by Andrew Dunn at Wikimedia Commons This post helps you find collocations and examples in context of the most common so-called academic words, based on The Academic Word List (see below). You can: look...
- Random Thoughts On The Expression Vanishingly Unlikely
At language blog The Stroppy Editor, Tom Freeman takes the Guardian to task for the way it treats part of a submission (for a government consultation process on child poverty) from a team led by Alan Milburn, "ex-Labour minister turned coalition...
- Q & A Is 'outwith' A Word?
It most certainly is, although you might get funny looks if you use it outwith Scotland. A detailed description of its usage would be outwith the scope of this Quick Answer, and might well be outwith my area of knowledge. And should my employers happen...