In this study all n-grams including the lemma hand were automatically retrieved from the British National Corpus and then formulaic sequences were manually distinguished. A special focus was given to at hand, in hand, on hand and to hand which occurred with reference to humans, animals, concrete inanimate items and abstract items. The abstract meanings were metonymic and metaphorical mappings of literal body part meanings onto more abstract meanings.

The data indicate that these sequences are the result of a lexicalization process in which they are developing towards univerbation. They seem to be processed holistically without regard to the meaning of the preposition, which is supported by the fact that they are now occurring written solidly in informal registers.

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These are just a few of the hundreds of questions on present-day English usage that have beed answered in GramTime News, a free corpus-based newsletter aimed at (among others) non-native teachers of English. Here you can ask your own usage questions, read answers to previous questions and get tips for websites and books that can be used for learning English. There are four issues of GramTime News per year.

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Contributing editor: Magnus Levin, PhD

This study concerns the text-organizing functions of the recurrent phrases

This corpus-based paper investigates the frequency, grammatical irregularity, and variational behaviour of formulaic sequences consisting of the N₁ to N₁ pattern with body-part nouns (e.g. face to face) and the analogical extension of the pattern to new, less frequent body-part nouns. These phrases show signs of lexicalization, such as lack of singular/plural distinction, lack of articles and very low likelihood of adjective insertion. While the pattern itself is grammatically irregular, it has a tendency to go through the regular process of conversion from an adverbial (go head to head), via a premodifier (a head-to-head competition) to a noun (a Christie-Lewis head-to-head). One further sign of univerbation is the use of hyphens, which is most frequent in the premodifier function and in nouns.

In this paper concepts from cognitive linguistics are combined with methods from corpus linguistics to study the phraseology formed around the frequent body part nouns FOOT and MOUTH. The material consists of The British National Corpus accessed through Fletcher’s (2003/2004) database Phrases in English supplemented with British, American and Australian newspapers on CD-ROM. In more than half of the occurrences in the BNC the single word forms foot, feet, mouth and mouths were used in phrases, where furthermore their meaning had often been extended metonymically or metaphorically. The frequent lemmas FOOT and MOUTH are thus frequent at least partly because they occur in conventionalized phrases.

Body parts are frequently mapped onto topographical phenomena in phrases like the foot of the mountain and the mouth of the river. Apart from being used in such phrases MOUTH is often connected to conventional ways of describing eating, drinking, speaking and the experience and expression of emotions. FOOT more often refers to location, and also occurs in phrases expressing other meanings, such as measurement. Metonymy and metaphor play a major role in the creation and extension of new phrasal patterns. Metonymic links are frequent because a physical reaction connected to the body part is used to represent the underlying emotion. In many cases these physical reactions have become such a conventionalized way of expressing the emotion that the reaction alone can stand for the emotion. The relative transparency of some phrases such as down in the mouth, stamping one’s foot and foaming at the mouth is likely to facilitate their learning in spite of the fact that they are not very frequent in themselves.

Phrases are often manipulated in various ways, so that they occur in non-canonical forms and in word play. The use of word play shows that the borderline between literal and nonliteral meanings is fuzzy, and that both a literal and a nonliteral meaning can be available to speakers simultaneously, although at any given moment one is usually more salient than the other.

In this paper Fletcher’s database Phrases in English is used to extract frequently recurring n-grams containing the verb 'stub' and the noun 'toe' from The British National Corpus. After analysing some of these n-grams, the paper focuses on the formulaic sequence 'stub one’s toe' and investigates this in the BNC, The New York Times and The Independent. Additional searches are also made on the World Wide web by means of WebCorp. It is found that the phrase is used with equal frequency in American and British English, but that the American use differs in that approximately half of the tokens are non-literal, while such use is relatively rare in British English. It is hypothesized that the non-literal use originated in American English and that it may be spreading to other varieties.

Corpora have been used for pedagogical purposes for more than two decades but empirical studies are relatively rare, particularly in the context of grammar teaching. The present study focuses on students' attitudes towards grammar and how these attitudes are affected by the introduction of concordancing. The principal aims of the project were to increase our students’ motivation by showing them that English grammar is more than a set of rules in a book and to enable them to assume more responsibility for their own learning. The idea was to introduce the use of language corpora into the curriculum for first-semester English at Växjö University in Sweden, as a complement to grammar textbooks and ordinary exercise materials. Between classes, the students worked with problem-solving assignments that involved formulating their own grammar rules based on the examples they found in the corpus. In the classroom, a system of peer teaching was applied, where the students took turns at explaining grammatical rules to each other. Besides presenting a new way of working with grammar, we also provided the students with a tool for checking questions of usage when writing English texts in the future, since the corpus we use is free of charge and available to all. The work with corpora and peer teaching was evaluated by means of questionnaires and interviews. This article describes and evaluates this initiative and presents insights gained in the process. One important conclusion is that using corpora with students requires a large amount of introduction and support. It takes time and practice to get students to become independent corpus users, knowing how to formulate relevant corpus queries and interpret the results. Working with corpora is a method that some students appreciate while others, especially weak students, find it difficult or boring. Several of the students did not find corpora very useful for learning about grammatical rules, but realized the potential of using corpora when writing texts in English.