RE: [Corpora-List] Incidence of MWEs

From: Adam Kilgarriff (adam@lexmasterclass.com)
Date: Fri Mar 17 2006 - 11:11:04 MET

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    So the "American" dictionary which gets it right is from a UK publisher.
    It's a UK dictionary of American English.

    Adam

    -----Original Message-----
    From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On
    Behalf Of Andy Roberts
    Sent: 17 March 2006 09:30
    To: Adam Kilgarriff
    Cc: 'Amsler, Robert'; 'Corpora List'; 'PEARSALL, Judy'
    Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] Incidence of MWEs

    On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, Adam Kilgarriff wrote:

    > Bob Amsler says:
    >
    >> I have found published dictionary's judgments as to what constitute MWEs
    >> to be both dated and biased against declaring MWEs to exist.
    >> ...
    >> Take an MWE such as "pencil sharpener". Most dictionaries don't ...
    >
    > UK dictionaries on my shelf do list "pencil sharpener" (Oxford D of E 98,
    > LDOCE 95, Macmillan E D 02). US ones (Random House 1987, M-W online)
    don't.
    > Moral is clear.
    >
    > US dictionaries are ***way, way*** behind UK dictionaries in corpus use.
    UK
    > dictionary publishers lead the world in corpus development and use (with
    NLP
    > lagging behind). OUP and Longman were prime movers in developing the BNC,
    > and OUP is now on the point of launching its billion-word corpus of
    English.
    > Collins-COBUILD was the great pioneer in the 1980s. Macmillan was first
    > user of my very own word sketches (corpus analysis software).
    >

    I think we should remember that dictionary publishers are often working
    to the contraints of traditional paper printing. There is clearly a
    contraint in terms of physical space. Therefore, regardless of how many
    MWEs the editors know of, there will be an inevitable culling in order
    to deliver a 'pickupable' product.

    I can't speak for others, but I know that Longman American dictionaries
    are corpus driven too. You'll find 'pencil sharpener' in Longman
    Advanced American Dictionary (the US equivalent of LDOCE).

    Andy Roberts



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