Corpora: Native discovery

 

The fact is, how do we know they are typos? I was curious, and I just tried to look of "if you have chance" on myspaces, and there are very few compared to "if you have the chance", etc., but still, there are some. And many of them come form native speakers, mainly form the UK, or so it seems... because, what do you know about those people? Maybe they are immigrants, maybe those were just typos, maybe it's a rare form in a rare dialect, maybe they are just dorks... but maybe they meant to write it that way, indeed. Who knows? No one knows. We can only know about your dialect or some others you happen to know about. So until someone from the UK comes up and say something about "if you have chance", we can just relax and go off topic. Hahaha.
BTW Amy, stop using the BNC. You are a Yankee, not a Brit! LOL And BTW again, I learned in one of your posts about the BYU corpus of American English. I didn't know about it, it seems a new one, and it might be very useful... I'm going to try it out.

Kooyeen

BTW Amy, stop using the BNC. You are a Yankee, not a Brit! LOL And BTW again, I learned in one of your posts about the BYU corpus of American English. I didn't know about it, it seems a new one, and it might be very useful... I'm going to try it out.

Hi Kooyeen
I have been using the BNC for quite some time precisely because I speak American English.  I've used it as a supplementary source of information about British usage. 

By all means, try out the BYU corpus. It's a good source of supplemental information.  Learn how it works and use it with a good dose of common sense.   Keep in mind that the "scores" you find there can sometimes be very misleading -- especially if you allow yourself to believe that the corpus is godlike.  People should not view "results" such as the following, for example, to be the "truth" about spelling:

The American Corpus, for the Academic register, gives:

CANNOT - 0
CAN NOT - 21261

(By the way, my previous post did not refer specifically to "have chance" -- my comment about typos was more general than that. )
.

<People should not view "results" such as the following, for example, to be the "truth" about spelling:>

Nor these about knowing how to use that corpus:

shan't-  0

..

These might show that you know something about using it, though:

sha n't - 495

Anonymous

Shame your words, like his, not on-topic. Such a waste. What was the purpose of your words, BTW? Not seen a typo before?

I am duly chastened.

MrP