Research into the Get-Passive in Speech and Writing
from Part II - Selection, Calibration and Preparation of Corpus Data
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2022
The authors review different baselines for the study of alternant choices, emphasizing that normalization to a standard number of words – while straightforward in its application – will in many cases not provide a meaningful measure of frequency. Instead, it is argued, we need a baseline indicating opportunities of use, such as phrase or sentence counts. Exemplifying their proposal with reference to get- and be-passives and the presence or absence of agentive by-phrases, the authors demonstrate a sequence of measures taken to make the quantities that are compared more meaningful and defensible, based on linguistically informed selections of baseline quantities (number of main verbs, passives or potentially alternating passives). Crucially, this process must involve a categorization of observations by the researcher to ensure that mutual substitution is plausible in each case. To calibrate this manual data verification exercise to a manageable level, the authors apply a method of uneven category sub-sampling to the data, and use it to adjust variance estimates and confidence intervals in their analysis.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.