Illustrations - for 'Using BNC XML for English language study'
These screenshots can be used instead of searching the corpus, or to show how to make a search.
Plurals of nouns
Note that there are two plural forms given: 'mice' and 'mouses' (in the lower window). By looking at the frequencies you see that
'mice' is much more frequent. A search for 'mouses' retrieves the examples below. By examining them you see that 'mouses' is very rarely used as a plural form
of 'mouse' other than in certain contexts (for example 'Mickey Mouses', spoken by children, or as an example of non-standard usage).
Figure 2. Concordance of 'mouses'
Adverb +adjective: very difficult?
Query Builder query
Looking for 'any adverb' followed directly by 'difficult'
Figure 8. Query Builder query
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