In my education classes, I remember every professor mentioning the importance of being a "lifelong learner." As a young, aspiring teacher, I thought this sounded kind of annoying and cheesy. "What? I'm supposed to teach--everyone else is going to learn from me!" Unfortunately, though, I realized I don't know everything (you can imagine this was quite a traumatic revelation for me).

The more I teach, the more I run into specific questions for which I don't quite know the answer. I also teach alongside some pretty veteran teachers who comment now and again about students asking difficult questions, which further cements the fact that I'll need to be a lifelong learner, too (I think "lifelong researcher" sounds more impressive).

The most important thing is not to know everything, but in most cases, to know where to look when you don't.

This applies to students, especially. I like to tell them, "I am like a set of training wheels [illustrated on the screen by the ever-handy Google Image Search]. Eventually you're going to go out into the big wide world and you'll be writing papers and doing presentations. You might want to use a word or structure, but you won't know how to use it, and I won't be there to help and guide you."

This is part of why I love using corpora in language teaching. It helps students be autonomous learners, and it gives me answers, and if you're like me, you miss that satisfying search for information you so often engaged in during college and graduate school (maybe you just found this laborious and annoying, so to each his own). The BYU Corpora have a search syntax page, and if you familiarize yourself with it enough, you can find some pretty specific information.  For example, you might want to see all derivations of a word (or in corpus linguistics, the lemma). You do this by enclosing a word in brackets to look for all forms of the word. Searching for:

[document]

will generate the following list:

Okay, so over a sixth of the forms are verbs (or participial adjectives). This makes me wonder, "How many of the instances of document and documents are actually verbs?" We can actually narrow this more by adding .[part of speech tag] to look for only those forms.

[document].[nn*] will look for all noun forms:

[document].[v*] will look for all verb forms:

If you run these searches yourself, you can click on each word to see more of the context. Most of my students are surprised when they find out a word they thought all along was a noun can actually be used as a verb, too. Well, that's all for now.

Have a good one, and good luck out there.

-Bill

Hello everyone!

I know it's been a while, but I had to attend a wedding over the weekend, and it's a little hard to make blog posts and film videos on interesting facts about the English language when you have a dozen women running around putting favors together and your son is not happy about the outfit he has to wear as ringbearer! I'm sure you can understand.

I contacted Mark Davies a couple days ago to ask if I could make a tutorial video on how to use the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and he gave me the go ahead (I was actually pretty geeked and somewhat starstruck when I got a reply--my wife had to pretend to be excited for me).

I just love this corpus so much... it's easy to use, it's fun, and it's so satisfying to my undying craving for information about English usage. I just want to give back to Dr. Davies in some way for developing such an awesome tool.

For me, the best thing about using a corpus is that it answers questions you can't find in style guides or dictionaries, which are usually behind the times anyway. It really burns my biscuits when I hear people say, "oh, such-and-such is a word now since it's in the dictionary." No, it was a word long before the Almighty Dictionary decreed it!

Also, corpora produce a sort of check and balance on the English teacher who likes to pontificate to students that "we don't say that in English." Sure, you don't say it, but what about the other thousands of instances of people saying it? (as an aside, I found in the COCA that like it or not, the word research is becoming countable).

Here is the video:

To those of you who aren't the most tech-savvy, I apologize if I move too quickly in the video. There is a lot of information to cover, but I like to keep my videos around 5 minutes since even that seems like a half an hour in this busy world of ours.

Speaking of time, if you have some, could you write a comment about something interesting you've discovered by using a corpus?

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

What other words come to mind when you hear the word father?

I was listening to a guy on the radio the other day talking about fatherhood. The man told a story about taking his kids to the store without his wife and how an older woman saw him and said: "Oh, it's so sweet that you give your wife a break and babysit the kids for her." He said how it was a big pet peeve of his that people call him a babysitter, and he said something like, "I'm not babysitting my kids, I'm fathering my kids." 

I totally agree with this idea, but using the word father like that just doesn't feel right. If you do a COCA corpus search for mother as a verb, you will find many uses that mean to care for or to look after:

The word father, on the other hand, paints a very different picture:

Generally, when father is a verb, it means to impregnate, but it doesn't seem to carry an idea of raising or parenting. Weird, huh?

We can raise, parent, rear, look after, or care for our children, but none of these are specific to fathers.  Does this tell us something about Western culture? Maybe it will get better if we look at collocations. 

What is the #1 adjective to describe the word father? 

Biological. 

(On a side note, the #1 adjective to describe mother is the word single.)

Hmmm... well, this is going downhill fast. It has to get better! What about the top ten words to collocate with father?

Well, at least loving made the list!

Happy Father's Day!

-Bill


NOTES
[1] Caroline Kennedy discussing an Elizabeth Alexander poem on NPR titled "Ode," which is about motherhood. I got this from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. If you use their search syntax, you can find words as a specific part of speech by typing 

word.[part of speech code]

So for example:

• mother.[n] will search for all uses of mother as a noun
• mother.[j] will search for all uses of mother  as an adjective, and 
• mother.[v] to find all occurrences of mother as a verb (which is what I did for this entry).
  

[2] From NPR interview with Dennis Chaptman (2001)

One useful skill students need to know how to do is transform a sentence from one form to another. With competitive language tests like the TOEFL, TOEIC, and IELTS, students are required to write complex and varied sentences. One strategy I like to show my students is how to turn a complete sentence (or clause) into a noun phrase.

First we have noun phrases, which are not complete sentences (they have no full verb--some call them fragments). For example:

a dog

This is a noun phrase (NP), but it isn't a complete sentence. What is the dog doing? What is happening to the dog? We don't know because it's a fragment. However, in English, NPs can be subjects:

(1) A dog bit his finger. (SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT)

NPs can also be objects:

(2) He bought a dog. (SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT)

Both (1) and (2) are clauses (complete sentences). They are also simple sentences, but you want complex sentences if want to impress that TOEFL essay rater! One way to make complex sentences is to take simple sentences and then make them into NPs so you can make them the subject or object of a sentence. What to do? Well, there are a variety of ways to do this, but I'll talk about three.

Strategy 1: Add that if it doesn't follow a preposition
You can add that to the beginning of a sentence to make it act like a NP (some call this a complement). 

(3) He dreamed [that a dog bit his finger].

(4) His wife was upset [that he bought a dog].

You can also make these the subject, but that form is more rare and a bit more complicated, so I'll explain it in another post in the indeterminate future.

Strategy 2: Change the main verb to the -ing form, and change any pronouns to the possessive
The -ing form of the verb can act like a noun (we call this the gerund). Once the verb is a gerund, you need to change any subject pronouns into possessive pronouns:

• I --> my
• he --> his
• she --> her
• it --> its
• we --> our
• they --> their

If it's not a subject pronoun, then don't mess with it.

(5) He dreamed about [a dog biting his finger]. 
Technically, "a dog's biting his finger" is correct but no human I know says this--you can find it in writing sometimes, but when I searched the COCA it was fairly rare. 

(6) His wife was upset by [him buying a dog].
(he becomes him and bought becomes buying)

Strategy 3: Add the fact that or the idea that if it follows a preposition
This one is a little bit trickier, but still very useful. I recommend doing a corpus search for

the fact|idea|notion that

After you've done that, then you can hopefully get an idea about when and where people use these expressions. Here are some examples I made:

(7) He dreamed about [the fact that a dog bit his finger]. (NOTE: It must be a fact to use the fact that.)

(8) His wife was upset by [the fact that he bought a dog].

These three strategies are a good starting point for making more complex sentences. Now go out and impress one of those essay raters!

Have a good one, and good luck out there.

-Bill

I really like Google Translate. The pronunciation is not perfect, but sometimes it's useful for illustrating certain language facts about English.

Take for instance English spelling. I am the kind of person who likes to know the reason for things, especially wacky things like English spelling, so when my students ask me questions like, "Why is English spelling so crazy?" I don't like to turn them away empty-handed:

A long time ago, in England...

Basically, some people thought it would be good to write English down and use a script. Well, the problem with this is once you write something down and wait long enough (like 400 years or so), the writing doesn't necessarily lineup with the pronunciation anymore.

So for example, take the word night. This word doesn't look like it sounds, but a long, long time ago, it probably sounded a lot more like it. Here's where you pull up Google Translate and type in nacht.

It should look like this:

You can then explain that English comes from German (which a lot of people already know), and you can click Listen to hear the pronunciation of nacht. You hear how it's got that scraping sound at the back of your throat? That's probably what night sounded more like about 400 or 500 years ago. So there you go.

Sometimes I also use Google Translate to explain how nouns combine into one big unit. For example, look at the phrase "disaster relief fund" (Google this for examples or use a corpus from my Links page). In English, this phrase operates like one word:

"The Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is an appropriation against which FEMA can direct, coordinate, manage, and fund eligible response and recovery efforts"(http://www.fema.gov/disaster-relief-fund)

If you Google Translate "disaster relief fund" into German, you get Katastrophenfonds (a combination of the German versions of the words catastrophe and funds). In these cases, I feel like English is pretending they are separate words, but grammatically, they're like one big unit. See? The Apfel doesn't fall far from the tree.

English spelling is still crazy, but if you're like me, it might relieve *some* of the frustration when you know why something is the way it is.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

I made a blog post a while back about function words and content words, and I felt like seeing it in print just didn't do it justice, so I made a movie with audio so you can hear this:

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

I've added a video section to the website with one lone video on basic prepositions. I'm hoping to add more to it soon, but check it out and let me know what you think on the youtube comments or on this blog post.

I apologize for the sound quality--it's very quiet. I'm sort of experimenting with my high-tech recording equipment (i.e. my 4-year-old laptop and built-in non-stereo microphone).

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

Okay, so I thought I was done, but curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know if the behavior in academic writing was atypical or the same as other writing like newspaper, magazine, and fiction. For the basis of comparison, I looked at each of the domains in the COCA:

Academic
Comma which: 82,741
[noun] which: 31,585
(2.6 to 1 ratio)

Fiction
Comma which: 42305
[noun] which: 10810
(3.9 to 1 ratio)

Magazine
Comma which: 95265
[noun] which: 7773
(12.3 to 1 ratio)

Newspaper
Comma which: 92,741
[noun] which: 5,392
(17.2 to 1 ratio)

So it looks like academic writing is the most common place to find people using which without a comma. This is very counter-intuitive and very interesting.

-Bill

Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, "Thou shalt not use 'which' in a restrictive relative clause, but shall always precede it with a comma."

A relative clause is basically a sentence that modifies another sentence (almost like a sentence that works like an adjective).

Look at this sentence:
1. That was difficult.

Now look at this sentence:
2. I took a test.

I can use (1) to modify (2):
I took a test that was difficult. 

Here I'm specifically talking about a difficult test--this is what we call a restrictive relative clause.

Some people say you should use that only with restrictive relative clauses but use which with non-restrictive relative clauses.

Example:
1. Bob gave me a shirt that had a hole in it. (restrictive)

2. Bob gave me a shirt, which was very generous. (non-restrictive)

In #1, it's a specific shirt that Bob gave me--the one with the hole in it! In #2, Bob gave a shirt, and I think it was very generous (the act of giving is generous--it's not a generous shirt).

So the rule goes you should use which whenever the relative clause does not restrict the noun it is modifying. I just read a blog post about the that/which rule. They used the first page of several great authors as evidence to support the idea that the that/which rule is not maintained by good writers.

I think "good writers" is too subjective. Let's look at more persnickety people. Sure, an author can have an air of arrogance, but what better place to look than published academic journal articles? Not only are they written by academics, but a team of academic editors scrutinize them heavily before they make it into print.

Using the COCA to look only at academic sources, we see the following uses of * which (* is any word):

So, which looks like the most common thing to occur with which is a comma (82,741 times!). The rest seems to be a bunch of prepositions (avoid splitting the infinitive in academic writing if you can help it).

But what about when we search for all instances of a noun before which? When I search for:

[nn*] which

 it gives me 31,585 results [1]. What if I add in adjectives and adverbs[2]?

Nouns: 31,585
Adjectives: 332
Adverbs: 446

So it looks like it's more common in academic writing to precede which with a comma, but not as uncommon to follow a noun with which and not use a comma (basically, the distinction that which is used ONLY for non-restrictive relative clauses doesn't seem to hold up).

Have a good one, and don't be scared by the bogeyman that says you always have to use a comma... unless they're handling your paycheck or grades!

-Bill


Notes
[1] I had to increase the default frequency from 100 to 3000 because otherwise, it only shows me the top 100 nouns to precede which.
[2] I wanted to look for verbs, but it becomes more complicated since it's hard to separate the continuous -ING, and the gerund (noun form) -ING.