Dear Vlado
The Cobuild dictionary (3rd ed 2001) gives research
as "N-UNCOUNT also N in pl",
i.e. it is uncountable (ie not used with a/an in singular form);
but is also used as a plural noun.
Bank of English evidence:
>Query is "researches/NOUN" [*Note from RK: to the extent that the
>POS tagging is accurate...]
>Term 1 in your query has been selected as the node
>
>272 matching lines
>Corpus Total Number of Average Number per
> Occurrences Million Words
>
>brbooks 76 1.8/million
>newsci 10 1.3/million
>strathy 19 1.2/million
>indy 29 1.0/million
>guard 30 0.9/million
>usbooks 23 0.7/million
>usacad 4 0.6/million
>usephem 2 0.6/million
>brmags 24 0.5/million
>brspok 9 0.4/million
>times 23 0.4/million
>bbc 8 0.4/million
>econ 5 0.3/million
>oznews 8 0.2/million
>brephem 1 0.2/million
>wbe 1 0.1/million
>sunnow 0 0.0/million
>usspok 0 0.0/million
>npr 0 0.0/million
>usnews 0 0.0/million
Of course, a lot of English texts on the Web are also written by
non-expert English speakers,
which will affect the distributions...
I wonder if the proportions are the same for other languages?
Best
Ramesh
At 16:50 07/12/2006, you wrote:
>Yet Another Story:
>
>After showing to one of my students how to use Google to verify
>validity of some lexical and syntactic constructs, a couple weeks later I
>was presented with significant Internet evidence that "research" is a
>count noun and "in many researches" is a valid phrase.
>
>--Vlado
Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences,
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ;
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp
Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/
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