If you are involved in language teaching rather than lexicography,
single word lists from small selective corpora can be seriously useful -
look at the arguments in Guy Aston's PALC paper - or mine for that
matter (both available in HTML at Tim John's home page
http://sun1.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/homepage.htm - go to the bibliography).
My growing experience is that so long as you declare what you are
comparing with what, you can say some pedagically useful things with
this sort of data. For example using a wordlist from the one million
word written set in "Core" BNC (ie the future BNC Sampler) as a
reference list + Mike Scott's Keywords propgram (WordSmith Tools -
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~ms2928/homepage.html), I'm finding plenty of
things to say things about a research corpus (112,000 words) of a
specific genre - and that the conclusions that you reach from this sort
of study can be useful for teaching purposes.
It may only be a drop in Jem's ocean - but it can still be an
interesting drop. There's more to corpus linguistics than lexicography.
Chris Tribble
--
POLAND Warszawa, ul. Zelazna 67 m.19, Poland
TEL +48 22 6245158 | FAX: +48 22 652 1806
UK 122, Queen Alexandra Mansions, Judd Street
London WC1 H 9DQ
TEL +44 171 833 4271
UK Mailing c/o The British Council: Poland, FCO (WARSAW)
King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AH
E-mail Christopher_Tribble@compuserve.com
ctribble@ikp.atm.com.pl
Home Page
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Christopher_Tribble