corpus based description of English

University had led the construction of two corpora of written contemporary English – Crown and CLOB. With the collaborative efforts of over 147 college English teachers and postgraduate students from over 107 universities across China, the corpus building project was nearly completed in December 2011, after which minor revisions had also been made till February 2012. One of the underlying assumptions behind the development of the 2009 Brown family corpora is that corpora following a similar sampling frame at a certain interval can serve as good resources for describing language change. That is to say, Crown and CLOB can be viewed as good reference corpora for contrastive studies in terms of historical change (e.g. comparison among Brown, Frown, AmE06 and Crown) and regional variation (e.g. Brown vs LOB, Frown vs FLOB, BE06 vs AmE06, and Crown vs CLOB). Moreover, a bigger balanced corpus of contemporary written English can be created when the Brown corpora are merged. The collection ...

This paper provides empirical evidence in favour of Martí Girbau's (2003, 2010) quantifier phrase analysis (QP of N) of the partitive construction, which is based on the analysis of verbal agreement in a large data set from the BNC (British National Corpus) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). The competing binominal N of NP analysis, advocated by some, predicts that there is number agreement with the first nominal element. In order to account for verbal agreement along these lines, two further principles, that of proximal agreement and possibly that of notional agreement, are needed. The agreement patterns with the partitive construction as observed in the corpus can be explained in a more elegant way when the NP is analysed in terms of a quantifier phrase followed by a nominal head (QP of N): verb number is predicted in 95.74% of the cases (compared to 54.24% when the binominal analysis is adopted), agreement in the remaining 4.26% exceptional cases falling out of further semantic and lexical considerations.