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Eckhard Bick - VISL

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7.3 Corpus research<br />

In the case of persisting difficulties with a particular grammatical topic, or for want<br />

of a satisfactory definition, a student may want to look at a few examples of how the<br />

feature in question is used in different sentences, something one would expect to<br />

achieve in traditional, text book based, exercises by referring back to a specific<br />

chapter in the grammar book. In the case of an IT interface with a live parser at its<br />

disposal, there is - in principle - no limit to the amount of corpus text to be searched<br />

for "typical" examples, and the illusion of a concise "chapter" can be created even<br />

with a chaotic "book" (corpus) with thousands of pages: While the grammar server<br />

searches the "book", the terminal will show the "chapter". Let's assume, for instance,<br />

that the student has a problem with Portuguese verb chains - he is in doubt just how<br />

and if prepositions can be integrated in auxiliary verb structures. He therefore clicks<br />

"open corpus search" in the task frame, and looks for prepositions preceded by<br />

auxiliaries (@FAUX or @IAUX) or followed by post-auxiliaries (@#ICL-AUX_PRP_@#ICL-AUX

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