Exploring Words and Phrases
Basic Searches and Exploring Frequencies
Corpora can be searched for particular words.Please is a relatively
infrequent word, so in the one million words included in ICE-GB there
were only 208 tokens (Wichmann, 2004, P. 1529).Only 88 of these were
in the spoken genres of the corpus so Wichmann then focused in on
these 88 tokens for closer analysis to see which were used in requests.Wichmann
(2004), for instance, investigated the use of please in the British
component of the ICE corpus (ICE-GB).The utterance in (1) from this study demonstrates the specific use of
please Wichmann investigated.Her initial approach in this
study was to search for all occurrences of please.79
(1) ICE-GB spoken sample
so Mr Lehrer if I can take you back please to page one o