Searching for Answers: you have to have a question

As you have seen, the searches we have been doing throughout these sessions have been motivated by a question. And many of these questions are typical questions that arise when one is producing language (i.e. speaking and writing). You might like to consider how else you can find answers to these questions without accessing a corpus.

Now that you know what the search results look like and have some idea of the information they reveal, you can start to consider how you will formulate your questions.

Interpreting results

As mentioned above, a search that returns fewer than 40 concordances suggests that what you are searching for is not very significant. While it is true that frequency is an indicator of typicality, …

But the purpose of the search has to be borne in mind. Are you looking for typicality or just some examples that it exists in English at all?

From another angle, you must also take into consideration that a single appearance of something among forty concordances could be significant. It is necessary to isolate it and search it directly. For example, VERB+2hypothesis shows

We might also turn this hypothesis on its head and argue …

Turning a hypothesis on its head only occurs once in this search, but turn@+3on+its+head reveals 25 concordances.

False friends

The internet will provide you with many pages of false friends: try an internet search on “false friends” English plus the name of another language into a search engine. Or click on Confusing Words to go to a list of words that are alike in various languages.

Practice makes perfect

So you think you know the parts of the body in English. Well, you probably do. But do you know what amazing things they can do or how they are described and referred to? Try this matching activity and then check your answers using CCS. You might like to add some other verbs beside each noun.

Nouns	Verbs
shoulders	pick
eye	wag
heart	lick
throat	grind
finger	blink
nose	gargle
buttocks	shrug
neck	pound
lips	crane
teeth	clench

Now find out which of the nouns can be used as verbs. For example, can one eye something, head something, mouth something or shoulder something? Search query: thumb@/VERB.

Can you match these? Can the concordancer help?

Adjectives	Nouns
accusing	shoulders
greasy	thumb
limp	lips
curvaceous	neck
hunched	finger
green	nose
stiff	buttocks
parted	wrist
pointy	palm

How are these words used metaphorically?

Nouns	Use
a shoulder of	burden
the eye of	music
to shoulder the	lamb
an ear for	stone
nerves of	a story
a nose for	steel
heart of	the storm

Metaphor is a fundamental aspect of communication. Many high frequency words are used in many different ways, which is partly why they are so frequent, and an aspect of their use that learners need to become familiar with. For more on this, you could read metaphors, an extract from Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980)

Can you find parts of the body words used in idioms or other fixed phrases?

What about this: grin@+3grin@ or the same search on smile or look