>
>... I think one cannot derive 1 per 250 from these figures, since phrasal
>verbs are treated and should be treated as "one word" -- a proportion of 1
>per 250 would count in one phrasal verb two times.
I think we should consider the presence of the object we want to count in
terms of some standard measure. The size of the object we're counting
doesn't matter particularly. That is, one might wish to count how many
instances of <complaint> or <passive> or "come down with" occur.
This can be per page/1,000 running words/text section. As there isn't a
good way of saying what a "page" is or how big a "text section" is, 1K
words or 1M words seems OK (even if it itself conceals a mass of complexity).
What we want (I think) to know is things like
-- is "come down with" more frequent or less than "put up with", "get away
with", etc?
-- are phrasal verbs more frequent or less than passive constructions?
I imagine the only case where the size of the object we were counting
really affected things would be if it exceeded the size of our standard
measure. It'd be odd to count how many <discussions of a philosophical
nature> there were per 1,000 words, but maybe not per 100M words (BNC).
Mike Scott
Applied English Language Studies Unit
University of Liverpool
Liverpool L69 3BX, UK.
Mike.Scott@liv.ac.uk
http://www.lexically.net
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~ms2928
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