Exploring Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English

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John Benjamins Publishing, Jan 1, 2002 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 342 pages
ICE-GB is a 1 million-word corpus of contemporary British English. It is fully parsed, and contains over 83,000 syntactic trees. Together with the dedicated retrieval software, ICECUP, ICE-GB is an unprecedented resource for the study of English syntax.Exploring Natural Language is a comprehensive guide to both corpus and software. It contains a full reference for ICE-GB. The chapters on ICECUP provide complete instructions on the use of the many features of the software, including concordancing, lexical and grammatical searches, sociolinguistic queries, random sampling, and searching for syntactic structures using ICECUP's Fuzzy Tree Fragment models. Special attention is given to the principles of experimental design in a parsed corpus.
Six case studies provide step-by-step illustrations of how the corpus and software can be used to explore real linguistic issues, from simple lexical studies to more complex syntactic topics, such as noun phrase structure, verb transitivity, and voice.
 

Contents

1 INTRODUCING ICEGB
2
2 THE ICEGB GRAMMAR
22
Exploring the corpus
69
3 INTRODUCING THE ICE CORPUS UTILITY PROGRAM ICECUP
70
4 BROWSING THE CORPUS
85
5 FUZZY TREE FRAGMENTS AND TEXT QUERIES
117
6 COMBINING QUERIES
177
7 ADVANCED FACILITIES IN ICECUP 31
203
The future of the corpus
284
10 FUTURE PROSPECTS
285
REFERENCES
301
APPEN DIX1 ICE TEXT CATEGORIES AND CODES
307
APPENDIX2 SOURCES OF ICEGB TEXTS
309
APPENDIX 3 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL VARIABLES
332
APPENDIX 4 STRUCTURAL MARKUP SYMBOLS
333
APPENDIX 5 A QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE TO THE ICE GRAMMAR
334

Performing research withthe corpus
232
8 CASE STUDIES USING ICEGB
233
9 PRINCIPLES OF EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN WITH A PARSED CORPUS
257
APPENDIX 6 SPECIAL CHARACTERS USED IN ICEGB
337
INDEX
338
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