On Wed, 10 Jul 1996, Lucie Langlois wrote:
>
>
> Good morning,
>
> 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
>