Finding language in context - Google site search

Let's say you've found a new word. You've looked it up in a dictionary and found an example sentence or two. Perhaps you've also found what other words it collocates with. (I'll be looking at some online tools to find collocates, in another post). What you'd like to do now is to see how it's used in context.

One possibilty is to use a corpus, ("a collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer. Plural - corpora" - Leoxicon), but these can sometimes be difficult to use, and when they include spoken language, the grammar is occasionally "non-standard", let's say. The British National Corpus is easy to use, but be careful with examples from spoken language.

Another way is to do a simple Google (or other) search. The Internet is one enormous corpus if you think about it, although no linguist has "collected" these examples. But a simple search can bring up a lot of irrelevant material, and again you're not really assured of grammatical correctness.

What I like to do is a Google site search of trusted newspapers and other websites, which are in effect small corpora, or look in Google Books, where the material has been edited and proofread, so is likely to be grammatically correct.

How I dealt to checking a New Zealand idiom

The prepositions that most commonly follow the verb deal are with and in, depending on meaning. In fact these collocations are so common, that deal with and deal in are often treated as phrasal verbs (or sometimes, prepositional verbs), for example at the OALD (scroll down to Phrasal Verbs). But it appears that in one corner of the English-speaking world, at least, deal with has a competitor.

A commenter on the language blog Pain in the English had noticed this sentence in the New Zealand Herald:

“Perhaps it’s time to deal to the ads that are just plain downers?”

Of course, there's no logical reason why deal should be followed by with. After all, we have the very similar expression see to - If you deal with the soup, I'll see to the main course. But with is what we're used to, so anything else sounds a bit odd.

Can 'a succession of' take a plural verb?

On the language website Pain in the English, in a discussion about whether it was ever posssible to use a capital letter after a colon, a commenter recently wrote:

Capitalize after the colon if there are a secession of sentences following

It wasn't so much the capitalisation issue that interested me as the next comment:

I am sure you meant to say, "Capitalize after the colon if there IS a succession of sentences," not "ARE."

Apart from the fact that I find it rather bad manners to "correct" other people's grammar uninvited, I wasn't totally convince that the second commenter was totally justified in his criticism. But I could find nothing about a succession of in any usage book or on the web, so I decided to investigate a bit.

Random thoughts on the expression vanishingly unlikely

At language blog The Stroppy Editor, Tom Freeman takes the Guardian to task for the way it treats part of a submission (for a government consultation process on child poverty) from a team led by Alan Milburn, "ex-Labour minister turned coalition adviser":

(the submission) adds: "It now seems vanishingly unlikely [sic] that this government will hit the targets in the Child Poverty Act."

By adding the expression [sic] after vanishingly unlikely, either the writer or a sub-editor seemed to be suggesting that these words contained an error of some sort, either grammatical or spelling.

Some random thoughts on different to

If you're a foreign learner looking for advice as to what preposition to use after different, I'd recommend using from; that way you won't tread on anybody's toes. You can read more about the use of different and easily confusable words such as other and next here. That advice, however, turns out to be more of a case of 'do what the teacher says' rather than what the teacher does.

This post brings together information from dictionaries and usage guides, a few statistics, as well as examples from the press and a few books. There are also some links to linguistics books that discuss the question.

Expressions with All but, none but, but for etc

You might occasionally come across sentences like these:

• The party was all but over when we arrived.
• All but one of the plates were damaged

The expression all but has a couple of different uses, and from what I've seen on language forums, this can give even native speakers some problems, so in this post we'll look at this plus a couple of other expressions with but.

Random-ised thoughts - Tristram Shandy, -ize and -ise verbs

This is part of an investigation I've been doing into the use and spelling of -ize suffix verbs and their spelling (-ize or -ise) in British English. For more details, related posts and the methods I've used, see the -ize / -ise page.