A4) "Give s.o. s.th." vs. "give s.th. to s.o." in the International Corpus of English (Using ICE-CUP)

Corpus: International Corpus of English, British section (ICE-GB)

Programs: ICE-CUP

Tasks:

• ICE-GB is a parsed corpus, so you can search for certain configurations in the syntactic (tree) structure of sentences.
• Using the Wizard, build a Fuzzy Tree Fragment (FTF) to search for the two constructional alternatives give/gives/gave/given/giving Oi Od vs. give/gives/gave/given/giving Od A (where A should contain the preposition to).
• Calculate their relative frequencies in percent.
• By looking at the examples, try to figure out what motivates their choice (hint: count pronouns vs. full NPs).
• Perform a short demo in class and prepare a brief tutorial for upload to the VC.

Notes:

• The corpus and the ICE-CUP interface can be accessed via DBIS (University login required): http://rzblx10.uni-regensburg.de/dbinfo/detail.php?bib_id=ub_ba&colors=&ocolors=&lett=fs&titel_id=1408
• When you launch ICE-CUP, you can access the “Getting started” guide from the initial window. In the bottom right corner of the same window you have to select the corpus (ICE-GB Release 2 in this case).
• You can also borrow the following user guide from Julia Schlüter: Nelson, Gerald; Wallis, Sean & Aarts, Bas (2002) Exploring natural language: Working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.