Further to posting my "anniversary" search done on a Canadian English
corpus, some "corporists" sent me questions and/or observations on the
data. Here are answers to a few of these queries, which I though might
be of interest to some of you.
1) Jane Edwards asked me if the pattern "number+year+anniversary"
could be generalized to mark any time landmarks, ie
"number+month+anniversary". It seems like it (from the corpus
data, at any rate), although it is less frequent than the "year+
anniversary" pattern. That being said, it's probably more of
a societal issue rather than anything else -- people tend to
celebrate "year" landmarks more than they do "months".
Here is the corpus search.
>> "month anniversary"
1: 7 matches
>> pr
390445251, .. With her one-month anniversary as PM coming up tomorrow, Kim Ca..
393881200, .. With her one-month anniversary as prime minister coming up on S..
23765459, ..Semenov's two-month anniversary in a Canuck uniform. "I think I..
175051339, ..une 1, the 18-month anniversary of its launch. Funds raised in ..
469318286, ..end, the five-month anniversary of starting her fitness training..
503213979, ..arked the one-month anniversary of the last win by either Burket..
361762636, ..ay -- the one-month anniversary of the turnover to the UN -- dip..
>> "week anniversary"
2: no match
>> "half anniversary"
3: no match
2) kr.pA pointed out that in my original search for the "year anniversary"
pattern, some concordances were repeated. This is due to the fact
that articles are sometimes published in more than one Canadian
newspaper. This, of course, is not particularly significant if you
get hundreds or thousands of matches. However, in a case like in the
above where there are only 7 hits, if 3 of the seven matches had been
repeats, that would have reduce the number of actual matches to 4 --
which might be significant if one is to perform some sort of analysis
on the data and reach valid conclusions.
Something else one should check is the "match point" (the string
of numbers on the left-hand side). If your query yields few hits
and their match points are very close to each other, you might want
to be careful -- these concordances most likely all come from the same
text, and thus the same author, and might represent an idiolect
rather than some sort of regional pattern.
3) For those who enquired about how to obtain this Canadian corpus,
you'll find the info on the Web at
http://www.infomart.ca/cd-roms/cd-roms.htm.
Is it now safe to say that today marks the "two-day anniversary"
(or 24-hour anniversary) of the anniversary question being posted
to the corpora list?
Lucie Langlois
Bilingual Canadian Dictionary
University of Ottawa