For some of these exercises, you will have to be familiar with the positional attributes of the BNC, for example the different class-tags or pos-tags. You can look them up in the info-file of the corpus, simply type info and press ENTER inside the BNC. For other exercises, you will have to generate frequency lists.

If you need some more information about querying for positional different attributes, see the Wiki-page about Complex Queries and Combinations of attributes and values. For more information on frequency lists, see this Wiki-page on Frequency lists.

Formulate a query that matches all instances of any adjective followed by the lemma snow or rain (but only as nouns), ignoring case, in the BNC-BABY.

Formulate a query that finds only matches using the going to-future, avoiding other instances of “going to” in the BNC-BABY.

Query only negated instances of the about to-construction in the BNC-BABY (e.g., “I'm not about to…”), using a suitable pos-tag. How many do you find?

1. Find all instances of the lemma heart occurring in the text_genre academic medicine. First, find out the exact name of the structural attribute in the info-file of the BNC, then use the command match.
2. Find all instances of the lemma occurring in the text_genre prose. Proceed as before.

Just from looking at the first 15 matches in each concordance, which common constructions do you see in the matches?

Query the English present perfect construction in the BNC-BABY without any words between auxiliary and past participle and create a frequency list of the participle verbs. Note that the frequency list should count lemmas. Be sure to ignore case.

(To match only verbs in the past participle form, you will have to have a look at the available pos-tags.)

What are the top-ten most frequent verbs in the construction?

Investigate the drive someone X-construction (e.g., “This was driving me mad”) in the BNC.

Consider the following questions:

1. Which of the construction’s slots remain the same, which are variable?
2. What is the host class of the last slot, i.e., what class of words can be used after the pronoun?
3. What is the meaning of the construction?

Many dictionaries state that venomous, toxic and poisonous are synonyms. Are they interchangeable in all contexts?

1. Create a query that finds venomous followed by a noun in the BNC-BABY.
2. Generate a case-insensitive frequency list of the nouns.
3. Repeat for toxic and poisonous.

Compare lists. What differences do you see?

Find the solutions here: Complex Queries – Solutions

Continue here: 6b. Queries with Repetition Operators (RegEx).