5. How to search
Using the BNC one can search for a lexeme by entering a word form (or a part of this word form plus wildcards). In corpora via the Internet it is also possible to search on lemma (a word or phrase treated in a glossary or similar listing = словарная форма слова - форма, представляющая лексему в словаре; a word considered as its citation form together with all the inflected forms. For example, the lemma go consists of go together with goes, going, went, and gone) and part of speech. The restriction of searching on wordform only entails problems related to, for example, homographs, which have different parts of speech. It is possible to conduct the search, presupposing one-to-five-element distance between the units as is useful in case of phrasal verbs. The retrieval-program then shows the frequency of the word form (= keyword). Subsequently, the concordances (keywords in restricted textual contexts; a book that indexes the principal words in a literary work, often with the immediate context and an account of the meaning – алфавітний покажчик слів у книзі з цитатами (у яких ці слова трапляються)) may be retrieved. The largest context is a bit longer than a paragraph.
The results one gets are from the whole corpus. So, if needed it is possible to refer to the list of works excerpted where besides the author and the title, the domain and year are indicated and select only those concordances you have interest in.
How it looks on the screen:
Simple Search from the British Library
Type a word or phrase in the search box and press the Go button to see up to 50 random hits from the corpus.
Начало формы
Look up:
Конец формы
You can search for a single word or a phrase, restrict searches by part of speech, search in parts of the corpus only, and much more. This is a link to the simple search facility hosted by the British Library.
The search result will show the total frequency in the corpus and up to 50 examples.
Theme 3. Structuralism.
Lecture # 3. Structuralism. Methods of structural analysis.
Structural grammatical theories.
N. Chomsky's Linguistic Conception. Competence and performance. Basic rules of Generative Grammar (= phrase structure rules).
Structuralism, from which Structural Analysis derives, is the methodological principle that human culture is made up of systems in which a change in any element produces changes in the others. Four basic types of theoretical or critical activities have been regarded as structuralist: the use of language as a structural model, the search for universal functions or actions in texts, the explanation of how meaning is possible, and the post-structuralist denial of objective meaning.
1. Structural grammatical theories.
Two main streams dominated linguistics in the 20th century. The first is structuralism represented by the Prague School that created functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created Glossematics (the same as Suassure’s but more abstract – their system of the difference between l-ge and speech is four-member: scheme/norm/usage/act), and the American School that created descriptive linguistics. The second stream of linguistic thinking is structuralism inseparably connected with the name of Noam Chomsky whose work meant a fundamental breakthrough in the development of linguistic theory in the second half of the XX century.
The essence of Structural Linguistics is in the tenet (belief) that every element has its place in the integrity of language structure and it is important to establish its place, its relation to other elements and consequently to function. Structural Linguistics deals with a real language structure and a scholar's task is to reveal it with the aim of a fuller cognition of language nature and laws of its functioning. Thus, structural grammarians are to a large degree concerned with studying patterns of organization, or structures. They hold the view that linguistics, like physics and chemistry or, say, geology or astronomy, must be preoccupied with structure.
Central to structuralism is the notion of opposition and oppositional analysis which is connected with the Prague School, founded in 1929 by Czech and Russian linguists Vilem Mathesius, Nikolay Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson and others.
Oppositional analysis was first introduced by Nikolay Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) who presented an important survey of the problem of phonology in his Grundzuge der Phonologie ('The Fundamentals of Phonology) published in Prague in 1939.
In terms of N.S. Trubetzkoy's theory, opposition is defined as a functionally relevant relationship of partial difference between two partially similar elements of language. The common features of the members of the opposition make up its basis, the features that serve to differentiate them are distinctive features. For example,
/b/ and /p/ are members of a phonological opposition: in English the phoneme /b/ is characterized by voicing, stop articulation (that is, it involves a complete closure), and it is oral, that is non-nasal, whereas /p/ shares all of those characteristics except voicing.
Girl and girlish are members of a morphemic opposition. They are similar as the root morpheme girl- is the same. Their distinctive feature is the suffix –ish.
Man and boy are members of a lexical opposition which is defined as the semantically relevant relationship of partial difference between two partially similar words The distinctive feature in the opposition is the semantic component of age.
Morphological (formal) opposition may be well illustrated by the pair play vs plays which represents the opposition between the third person singular present tense, on the one hand, and the other persons or the singular plus those of the plural, on the other,
Oppositional relations on the sentence level are most obvious in the correlation between Peter plays and Peter does not play which gives the opposition affirmation vs negation. Correlation between Peter plays and Does Peter play? illustrates the opposition declarative vs interrogative sentence.
The main contribution of the American Descriptive School to the study of grammar is the elaboration of techniques of linguistic analysis. The main methods are: