LINGUIST List 21.2842

Thu Jul 08 2010

FYI: Database of Possessive NPs in English and Swedish

Editor for this issue: Rachelle Felzien <rachellelinguistlist.org>


        1.    David Denison, Database of Possessive NPs in English and Swedish

Message 1: Database of Possessive NPs in English and Swedish
Date: 06-Jul-2010
From: David Denison <david.denisonmanchester.ac.uk>
Subject: Database of Possessive NPs in English and Swedish
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The project "Germanic possessive -'s: an empirical, historical andtheoretical study" announces the release of a searchable online database ofpossessive constructions in English and Swedish, freely available to theresearch community from the project web page:

http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/germanic-possessive-s/

The database contains the possessive constructions found in two corpora ofspoken language:

* British English: the spoken component of the British National Corpus (c.10 million words)* Swedish: the Gothenburg Spoken Language Corpus (c. 1.2 million words)

There are some 44,000 records of possessive NPs, searchable according to awide range of criteria. Results can be sorted, viewed on-screen incomplete sentences, or downloaded. The British data can be viewed with orwithout the BNC word class tags (and there are hyperlinks to BNCweb forusers of that interface). There is an on-screen description and contextualhelp. Web programming is by Christopher White.

The project ran 2006-9, supported by the AHRC, with principal investigatorsKersti Börjars and David Denison and research associate Alan Scott. Seethe project site for further information and a list of publications.

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology
Subject Language(s): English (eng)                             Swedish (swe) Language Family(ies): Germanic

Page Updated: 08-Jul-2010