A7) KÄSTLEN, OTT-WAGNER;"Pretty": adjective vs. adverb (BNC + BNCweb)

Corpus: British National Corpus (BNC)

Programs: BNCweb

Tasks:

• Pretty as an adjective can premodify nouns or be used in predicative function. Pretty as an adverb occurs mostly before adjectives and other adverbs. The BNC is a Part-of-Speech-tagged corpus in which the disambiguation has been carried out by a semi-automated tagging procedure. Use the Part-of-Speech (POS) tags to find out frequencies of these grammatical functions in the different sections of the BNC.
• Compare the relative percentages of pretty (Adj) and pretty (Adv) in the different subdivisions of the corpus.
• Carry out manual spot checks to find out to what extent the POS-tagging is adequate.

Notes:

• The corpus and the BNCweb interface can be accessed via the departmental server: https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/
• You need to sign up for a free user account to get access to the corpora (also here https://eng-ling.uni-bamberg.de/).
• 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.

Solution: Mini-project A7.pdf