A16) STEINBACH; Regional variation of idioms (BNCweb + COCA via CQPweb)

Corpora: British National Corpus (BNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

Programs: BNCweb, CQPweb (different name, different colour, but virtually the same interface)

Tasks:

• Find all occurrences of both a drop in the bucket and a drop in the ocean in both corpora
• Compare the relative percentages of the above mentioned idioms.
• Use the collocation function of BNCweb/CQPweb to find out whether there are other common collocations for a drop in the.

Notes:

• The corpora can be accessed via the departmental server: https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/
• You have to sign up for a free user account to gain access to the corpora.
• The quick reference guide (https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/bncweb/Simple_query_language.pdf) can also be accessed via the BNCweb interface.
• In addition, you can borrow the following user guide from Julia Schlüter: Hoffmann, Sebastian et al. (2008) Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb: A Practical Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Last but not least, there is a youtube channel with instructional videos for the CQPweb interface here:

Solution: Mini-project A16.pdf