Parts of Speech searches

Every word in the CCS has its part of speech (POS) marked, or tagged. You can imagine that tagging every word in a multi-million word corpus is a daunting job. In fact, it is done by computers with an estimated accuracy rate of 95%. Being able to search for a word by POS is often essential. For example, the word form ROSE can be a flower or the past tense of rise. Mixed search results will not be helpful.

Some POS issues have been deliberately avoided in CCS, such as the use of some participles as adjectives: winning is not marked as an adjective in “winning smile” and failed is not marked as an adjective in “a failed bank”, but homing is in “homing device”. Also above and fast cannot be located using the adverb tag. Nevertheless, it still provides a view on language that I couldn't imagine finding out about in any other way (apologies to Jan Svartvik).

Textové pole: TIP: remember that using Ctrl N, you can open several windows and perform several searches at the same time. As we noted in Session 2, fast can be a noun, verb, adjective and adverb. Being able to specify a search word’s POS allows you to find a word in more specific contexts and in a more specific sense. If you were wondering whether to use the adjective fast or quick in a particular situation, you would obtain more useful data by specifically searching for the words as adjectives. Search for fast/JJ and then search for quick/JJ.

The query syntax is: the word, a slash and the tag in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Here is list CCS POS tags. Other corpora have different tags, and other concordancing programs have different ways of forming a query.

Table of POS tags

This is an expansion of the information provided on the Cobuild site below the concordance entry box.

NOUN	a macro tag: stands for any noun tag	walk/NOUN
VERB	a macro tag: stands for any verb tag	dog@/VERB
NN	common noun	peer/NN
NNS	noun plural	needs/NNS will not show the word as a 3^rd person singular verb.
JJ	adjective	sound/JJ not as a verb or noun.
DT	definite and indefinite article	This is used in word strings, as we shall see in Session 6. It gives a, an and the.
IN	preposition	This is used in word strings, when you want a word plus preposition.
RB	adverb	Is there an adverb derived from prohibit? *prohibit/RB Or from ration/RB*?
VB	base-form verb	trigger/VB or impact/VB
VBN	past participle verb	read/VBN – useful if studying passive or perfect aspect. And you can separate out adjectival uses.
VBG	-ing form verb	read/VBG – useful if studying continuous aspect. And you can separate out adjectival uses.
VBD	past tense verb	set can be present and past. set/VBD only shows concordances where it is a past tense verb.
CC	coordinating conjunction	e.g. and, but
CS	subordinating conjunction	e.g. while, because
PPS	personal pronoun subject case	e.g. she, I
PPO	personal pronoun object case	e.g. her, me
PPP	possessive pronoun	e.g. hers, mine
DTG	determiner-pronoun	e.g. many, all, both, some

Note: these POS tags become much more powerful when used in combination as we see in Session 5.

Refining your searches

You can now refine the searches you tried in the previous session.

Lemma:

Try a search on peer, which is a proper noun, and has two meanings as a common noun. It is also a verb. Try peer@. Try peer@/NOUN and peer@/VERB

Word Family:

Try preten*/JJ. and see adjectives starting with “preten”.

Try prohib*/RB and you will see the derived adverb.

Try contra*/NNS and you will see quite a few nouns in the plural that start this way.

What nouns are in the contract family? Try contract*/NOUN

What adjectives derive from oil? Search oil*/JJ.

What adjectives derive from club? club*/JJ