A11) FENG, FEY, HYE RUNG; The "get" passive (COHA + BYU interface)

Corpus: Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)

Programs: BYU-interface

Tasks:

• The construction get V-ed has undergone important frequency changes in the past two centuries. The COHA is a Part-of-Speech-tagged corpus in which all verbs have been lemmatised (i.e. associated with their base form) and all past participles have been assigned a certain tag. Exploit the relevant lemma and Part-of-Speech (POS) tag combination to detect frequency changes of the construction in American English since 1810.
• In addition, find out to what extent the variant gotten takes over from got when used as a past participle. Calculate the relative percentages of got V-ed and gotten V-ed for each decade covered by the corpus.

Notes:

• The corpus and the BYU interface can be accessed on the Internet: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/
• After a few searches you will have to create a username and password (free of charge).

• Users taking part in the course "Methods and Theories in Linguistics" can use the password metheling to join the account for the University of Bamberg: In order to do so, make sure the [Organization] in the form under "Personal Information" at the bottom of that page matches the name Universität Bamberg (exactly), and click [Update]. Then enter the password metheling and click on [Join Group], after which you will then be added to the group account for our university. You will then have increased access and advanced features.

• Try out the different display modes (upper left corner).
• If you want to save your results, the best idea seems to be highlighting and copying/pasting of content.
• The website itself includes a help function and ample documentation.

Solution: Mini-project A11.pdf