Corpora tips
More than simple searching:
getting more from the BNC
by Mairi MacDonald

Next in a series of articles looking at ways in which teachers and students can explore words using free corpus resources on the Web.

The British National Corpus (BNC)

The BNC contains 100 million words and over 4,000 samples of written and spoken language of British English. The BNC website offers free simple searching of its entire collection.

The simple search returns up to 50 random citations. The website as a whole can be rather difficult to navigate but the good news is that improvements are on the way and there is no real need to stray far from the search page. Search results are returned unsorted and unformatted and with only a single search box and no options to select, the search page is very straightforward. Despite this, the 'simple' search allows you to dig out some fairly detailed and valuable information.

Searching according to part of speech

The major difference with this online corpus is that every word in the BNC is tagged. This means that every word is assigned a code according to its grammatical function in the sentence it appears in. This allows you to differentiate between say bill as a verb, noun and even proper noun.

A complete list of codes can be found at www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/what/gramtag.html
(Scroll down to B. THE BNC BASIC TAGSET), but the basic codes are as follows:

NN1 - noun
NN2 - plural noun
NP0 - proper noun
AJ0 - adjective
VVB - verb

Here are a few examples of searching for noun, verb and proper noun uses of bill. You must use capitals when you type in a part of speech code or the search engine won't recognise it as a code.

bill=NN1
I paid our bill and we went out into the cold blue day.

bill=VVB
In the process of doing so, they bill the user for any Cellnet or Vodafone services that they use while making calls.

bill=NP0
Bill Fox and Michael Sinclair of York, who represent the associate members of the lower divisions on the management committee, are to meet officers of the GM Vauxhall Conference next Thursday to outline the League's new requirements.

Vocabulary work – homonyms

Narrowing down your search to a part of speech is a good way of looking at homonyms. Two searches – bill=NN1 and bills=NN2 – produced the following examples of bill as a noun.

For example, little luxuries may cost more to install, but can actually reduce fuel bills.

Gomez had produced another of his crisp thousand-dollar bills.

Nothing but bills as usual --; she didn't seem to get a great deal else these days.

Now they have to spend their mornings planning budgets and their afternoons paying bills.

Oystercatchers use their bright orange bills to open shellfish, but use two distinct types of opening techniques.

Rejected appeals to commit the next Labour government to introducing a Bill of Rights.

The pigeons were then split into two groups, one of which had their bills smeared with olive oil and the other with turpentine.

We are faced with a Government who are determined to get the Bill on to the statute book before an election.

This type of search can be applied to any homonym you want to look at with your students. Copy and paste your results into a worksheet and get students to guess the word you're looking at and underline it. In pairs they can try to work out the meaning from context and group the sentences according to meaning. The headings taken from the definition of bill¹ noun in the Macmillan English Dictionary provide a useful framework for the examples above:

If you are teaching a specific language point, it is a good idea to copy and paste the results into a separate document. This gives you editorial control over the content and prevents students having to wade through too much material. Moreover, as the citations generated by any one search are random, you cannot guarantee that the perfect example you found previously will surface again when your students try the search out for themselves.

Pulling out phrasal verbs

In most online corpus resources word units such as phrasal verbs can be difficult to pin down, but by using the code AVP (adverb particle) you can pull out phrasal verbs containing the same particle.

Here is a selection of results from a search using up=AVP and out=AVP:

It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term `;greatness';.

He picked up the tins; then, leaning towards her, he said, `;Nice to be served by a pretty face.

I have just turned 21 and I think at this age I am just starting to grow up anyway.

Maybe he beat her up.

As the car drew up in front of the Lodge with a crunch of gravel, Detective Sergeant Allen strode out to meet them.

No one, to my knowledge, ever found out.

Britain will carry out a joint naval operation with Colombia in the Caribbean aimed at intercepting cocaine shipments.

But how do you sort out the goodies from the baddies?

Classroom applications – phrasal verb worksheet

1 Once you have a selection of examples, copy and paste them into a Word document. Get students to identify the phrasal verbs or note down any phrasal verbs that are new to them. Use the extracts as a basis for looking at phrasal verb behaviour by discussing points such as:

•	Is the phrasal verb separable or inseparable?
•	How does the particle change the meaning of the verb?
•	Which phrasal verbs are used in a formal context? Which ones are used informally?

2 Students could also try to work out the meaning of any new phrasal verbs and use their dictionaries to check their work.

3 As a follow up in the next lesson, give out the same worksheet but with the verb element of the phrasal verb blanked out and get students to fill in the gaps:

It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term `;greatness';.

He picked up the tins; then, leaning towards her, he said, `;Nice to be served by a pretty face.

I have just turned 21 and I think at this age I am just starting to grow up anyway.

Maybe he beat her up.

As the car drew up in front of the Lodge with a crunch of gravel, Detective Sergeant Allen strode out to meet them.

No one, to my knowledge, ever found out.

Britain will carry out a joint naval operation with Colombia in the Caribbean aimed at intercepting cocaine shipments.

But how do you sort out the goodies from the baddies?

Next in the series

In the next issue, I'll be looking at how to extract examples of spoken English from the BNC and giving some suggestions on how these might be used with your class.

Data cited in this article has been extracted from the British National Corpus Online service, managed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the texts cited are reserved.