the tuscan word centre

© J. Sinclair 2002

In most languages words occur in different forms; English has fewer inflections than other European languages, but quite a number of "derived forms". A derived form is a word formed from another word by a change of ending, usually indicating a change of word class, eg from verb to noun (speak to speaker) or adjective to adverb (sweet to sweetly).

Does the meaning remain constant during such changes? With a corpus we can explore what different collocations there are, and assess the similarity or difference of meaning.

1. Look up the adjective enormous in your corpus to get a rough idea of the nouns that are modified by enormous, and see if they can be grouped or classified - for example if they have similar reference, or if they share some nice or nasty strand of meaning.

2. Sort them in other ways too in order to find evidence of regularity or restriction in the words that appear close to enormous. Make notes on what you find.

3. Now look up the word enormity, which is a noun derived from enormous. Gather the biggest corpus you can find because it is not a frequent word.

4. Sort the instances to the right, at position three to begin with, to find as many nouns as possible, but also look at positions two and four. See if you can group or classify these nouns.

5. Look in other places, especially to the left of the node, for other words and phrases that support your interpretation.

6. Make a short comparison of the meanings of enormous and enormity as shown in the corpus evidence. Add any observations that you think are relevant but which have not arisen in the performance of the task.