词汇大师(Wordmaster)--American National Corpus

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: November 6, 2003

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the American National Corpus!

RS: In linguistics¹, a corpus is a body of words. It's language collected in context, from books, poems, recorded conversations, newspapers, broadcasts -- any way language is used. Researchers, dictionary publishers, advertising² writers and other users can easily search the collection by computer to find out how people naturally use language.

AA: There's a British National Corpus. And now there's one for American English. Developers of the American National Corpus want to collect one-hundred-million core words -- and perhaps several hundred million more, to provide the broadest possible selection of texts and genres³.

RS: Paulo Quaglio is a Brazilian-born research assistant for the American National Corpus.

QUAGLIO: "One of the things that we have learned is that native speaker intuition is very often inaccurate⁴. So I'm going to give you an example from my personal research. So let me ask you a question. If you had to choose between these two sentences that I'm going to give you, which one would you choose. And there's no right or wrong, OK?"

RS: "All right."

QUAGLIO: "And the first is, 'I haven't seen you in two years.' And the second is, 'I haven't seen you for two years.' What would you say, in or for?"

RS: "For."

AA: "I would say 'in,' and I would think it sounds more British English to say 'for.'"

RS: "'I haven't see you for two years,' 'I haven't seen you in two years.' To me, it doesn't make a big difference."

AA: "Well ... "

QUAGLIO: "OK, that's interesting. So that is a question that corpus linguistics can answer. So what do we do, we go to this huge body of language and we search for those occurrences and we try to find patterns of occurrence. Let me just guess one thing -- this is not always true, but Avi, would you be younger than Rosanne?"

AA: "Well, yes."

QUAGLIO: "OK, so what our research has shown is that in American English this construction is used with 'in' 75 percent of the time, and it seems to be correlated with speaker age.

AA: "Wait, so the sentence 'I haven't seen you in two years' -- 'IN two years' rather than 'FOR two years' -- is more likely to be used by younger Americans, than 'for two years.'"

QUAGLIO: "Exactly."

AA: "Wow."

RS: "Maybe it's because I've just been with my 85-year-old mother. [laughter]"

QUAGLIO: "Both are used, but in British English 'for' occurs 98 percent of the time."

RS: "That's interesting, because I was recently in England. Maybe all these influences of being around my 85-year-old mother and being in England ... "

AA: "You were only there for a week!"

QUAGLIO: "Or it could also be the region that you're from here in the United States."

AA: "You know, I'm curious, with the influences of instant media and television and the Internet and so forth⁵, and I know you've just released the first installment⁶ of 10 million words -- "

QUAGLIO: "Right."

AA: " -- is it safe to assume that by now, maybe some of those words aren't used as frequently as maybe they were five or 10 years ago or whenever they were first compiled?"

QUAGLIO: "Well, language is constantly changing, and I can give you an example -- for example, the use of the adverbial intensifier 'so.' So when you take a look at grammars for example, you see there that 'so' modifies an adjective or an adverb. So, for example, 'she's so beautiful,' 'oh that was so beautifully done.' But then when you take a look at a more recent corpus, you see that 'so' is modifying a verb and it's also modifying a noun. Examples are 'oh I so want to do that.' Right, you've probably heard that before?"

RS: "Right."

QUAGLIO: "So this is really new. So we heard that a lot here on campus and we said 'oh, this is kind of interesting,' and then we saw that on this particular television show that I am analyzing⁷. And so somebody says 'hey, you're so the man!' Hey, 'man' is a noun."

AA: "Or my daughter will say 'that's so not right.'"

QUAGLIO: "Exactly. This is the second point. Why not say, for example, 'this is so untrue'? What is the difference between that and 'this is so not true'?"

RS: Paulo Quaglio is a research assistant for the American National Corpus, and a doctoral candidate at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. The corpus will be updated and distributed freely for non-commercial research purposes.

AA: Commercial use will be limited at first to members of a consortium. These include publishers, software companies and academic members. The Web site for the project is americannationalcorpus -- all one word -- dot o-r-g. We'll post a link at our site.

RS: Our address is voanews.com/wordmaster. And don't forget our e-mail address. It's [email protected]. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble

1 linguistics   

n.语言学

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• Linguistics is a scientific study of the property of language.语言学是指对语言的性质所作的系统研究。

2 advertising   

n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的

参考例句：

• Can you give me any advice on getting into advertising? 你能指点我如何涉足广告业吗?
• The advertising campaign is aimed primarily at young people. 这个广告宣传运动主要是针对年轻人的。

3 genres   

（文学、艺术等的）类型，体裁，风格( genre的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Novel and short story are different genres. 长篇小说和短篇小说是不同的类别。
• But confusions over the two genres have a long history. 但是类型的混淆，古已有之。 来自汉英文学 - 散文英译

4 inaccurate   

adj.错误的，不正确的，不准确的

参考例句：

• The book is both inaccurate and exaggerated.这本书不但不准确，而且夸大其词。
• She never knows the right time because her watch is inaccurate.她从来不知道准确的时间因为她的表不准。

5 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

6 installment   

n.(instalment)分期付款；(连载的)一期

参考例句：

• I shall soon pay the last installment of my debt.不久我将偿付我的最后一期债款。
• He likes to buy things on the installment plan.他喜欢用分期付款法购买货物。

7 analyzing   

v.分析；分析( analyze的现在分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析n.分析

参考例句：

• Analyzing the date of some socialist countries presents even greater problem s. 分析某些社会主义国家的统计数据，暴露出的问题甚至更大。 来自辞典例句
• He undoubtedly was not far off the mark in analyzing its predictions. 当然，他对其预测所作的分析倒也八九不离十。 来自辞典例句