Module Eight Video The problem is that many people have 'fossilised
errors': incorrect uses which are becoming a part of what they write. Here is an example:
"This books are interesting ..." Probably lots of people seeing that sentence
will detect the error immediately (it should be: "These books are interesting ..."). But
this is a common mistake because the words this and these sound so similar. That’s
why this books sounds right to a lot of people. It’s easy to spot the error here because
the sentence only contains 4 words and because I told you that there is a mistake. But how
to find a mistake when it’s in the middle of a long essay that you wrote?
How can the person who wrote, "This books are interesting ..." spot the error? That's
the problem! After all, that person wrote This books because they think it is correct
– they didn't make the mistake on purpose! After writing an essay of 250 words you might
spend perhaps two hours self-correcting it. You should take the view that a lot of what
you wrote might be incorrect. So ask yourself about each sentence: "Am I sure that is correct?
What evidence do I have?" If your name is Ana and you have written the
sentence 'My name is Ana', then you can be sure it's correct because you have seen sentences
like 'My name is Julie' and 'My name is John' in books that you know are written in correct
English. If you think hard you can feel that you have a good reason – it's a very common
structure which you know you know. That is the important point: use sentences
that you know are correct as models for your own writing. If you have any doubts, where
can you find such sentences? In the dictionary. If you look up the word this in the Cambridge
Advanced Learner's Dictionary, you will find that the entry makes very clear with explanations
and examples that this is used before singular nouns and these before plural nouns. Indeed,
there is even an example which starts like this:
These books are ... I've chosen a very simple example here. But
the same goes for other words. For example, if you have used a preposition after a verb,
is it the right preposition? (Prepositions are a notorious source of error). If you have
used another verb after a verb, is the second verb in the right form? Should it be the infinitive
or the -ing form? At first it seems a lot of time – and it
is – but it is very efficient use of your time because you are checking YOUR English,
the English you like to use. You will soon find that you don't need to check so much
– because you know you know. That is, you are building up a body of English phrases
and structures which you can use with confidence.
Now I want to introduce you to a tool that will help you a lot. The British National
Corpus. The British National Corpus is a huge online corpus of correct English. A corpus
is a large collection of texts which is held on computer and can therefore be accessed
electronically. And in the case of The British National Corpus you can access it online.
The British National Corpus contains the texts (but not the pictures or photographs) found
in lots of newspapers, periodicals, journals, novels and non-fiction books, letters and
messages, essays, etcetera and the transcripts of lectures, casual everyday conversations,
and radio programmes. All this language (the novels, newspapers, conversations etc) was
produced in the later part of the 20th century. In total the corpus contains approximately
100 million words. What can we do with such a corpus?
Well if you go to this link: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
And click “Enter” to move through into the interface itself.
On the left-hand side at the top, under the heading “DISPLAY” select KWIC. Under “SEARCH
STRING” there is a box next to “WORD(S)”; there you can write a word or phrase. Let’s
say we write depend. We click on “SEARCH” and then you will see some lines of text appear
in the white box in the middle. In the blue title line it says:
KEYWORD IN CONTEXT DISPLAY And there is a number:
3,425 TOKENS And below this notice are 100 examples of
depend in sentences from the corpus. There are 3425 examples of depend and 100 of them
are shown to you. They are shown to you in context – in the sentences from books and
newspapers for example which form part of the corpus. Here is an example – one of
the uses of depend in the corpus: in the system . This feature is intended for
users that depend on constant information feeds , such as financial trading
(The colours indicate nouns (in blue), verbs (in pink), prepositions (in yellow).) And
on the left there is this: 12
CNK W_non_ac_tech_engin
A B C If you click on this, a page opens which starts
like this: Source information:
. Date (1985-1994)
Title Computergram international. 253 s-units. This tells you what the text is and when it
was written. And there is also an Expanded context below this.
This tells you where the sentence comes from. As you can see, it comes from a publication
called Computergram International. It is often useful to know where the sentence comes from.
If it is a published book then you know that it has been carefully written and carefully
edited. That’s important for us on this course because we want to be sure that we
are using good models – models we can rely on. Reliable examples.
The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words but ten million words of
that is spoken English. Now, spoken English is not such a good guide to written English.
In spoken English people make mistakes, they change direction in the middle of the sentence,
they stop and then they start again, they talk in a way that is OK for talking but not
for writing where there are different rules. So remember, if you are using the British
National Corpus to check if a phrase is correct in writing, you need to find evidence in written
texts. We can limit our search to written texts by selecting options in the “SECTIONS”
box below “SEARCH STRING”. In list 1 select “FICTION”, then hold
the “Shift” key and select “MAGAZINE”, “NEWSPAPER”, “NON-ACAD”, “ACADEMIC”
and “MISC”. Now click “SEARCH” again in the box above. This will produce a new
set of results beginning with this: KEYWORD IN CONTEXT DISPLAY
3,257 TOKENS Now there are 3,257 instances of depend. This
is because we have eliminated the spoken sections of the corpus so instances of depend in those
sections are not counted. But we now know that every example is from written English,
not spoken. You will notice that it is also showing a different 100 examples of depend.
This will happen every time you search. And don’t forget that you can also get examples
of depends and depended and depending … And if you want, you can also write a phrase;
for example, depends of. If you do that you discover that the phrase depends of occurs
ten times in the 100 million words. Here is an example:
It all depends of course on what is meant by ‘the feminine’.
Ah! Earlier in the course we decided that depends of was wrong – and it was wrong
in the sentence we were looking at, but here we see that there are exceptions. And this
is very normal. The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words;
that’s a lot of language. There are lots of things that you wouldn’t have thought
were possible – until you see them. For example, if you ask English speakers if you
can use of after depend they will probably say “no”. Until you say, “And what about
it depends of course on the weather?”. And then they say “Oh yes, I hadn’t thought
of that ….” But remember; just because a phrase in your
writing also occurs in the British National Corpus doesn’t mean that you have used it
correctly. Ideally, you need to see the phrase used by two or three writers in just the way
you want to use it. Now here is the task for this module. I want
you to look at this sentence: Then he said us he had always worked as waiter.
Now, there are two mistakes in that sentence. You can probably see them immediately but
finding the errors is not the task – or not yet anyway. Now, we can divide that sentence
into pairs of words: Then he, he said, said us, us he, he had, had always, always worked,
worked as, as waiter. That’s nine pairs. Notice that most of the words form part of
two pairs: he is the second word in Then he and the first word in he said, for example.
You can look up each pair in the British National Corpus and see how often it occurs. For example,
the pair Then he occurs 5,831 times, and the pair he said occurs 34,434 times.
Your task is to find the numbers for all nine pairs. Which are the two lowest numbers? Where
are the two mistakes in the sentence? As usual, if you have any doubts, then the forum is
the place to discuss this.