Posted: May 9th, 2015

The Utilization of BNC Corpus in Comparing Two Synonymous Nouns Error and Mistake

Carry out an analysis by utilizing BNC Corpus in Comparing
the two synonymous nouns: Error and Mistake.
• Compare the words in terms of their collocations, distributions, and
any other aspects of meaning and use that you consider relevant.
• Compare your findings to the information on your chosen words in
two dictionaries of English: one old (pre-1985) and one new (post-1995),3
• Critically discuss the value of corpus-based approaches for studying word
meaning and use.
It is recommended to use the British National Corpus( BNC ) as the main data for this topic.
http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/user/login.php
• State your aims and research questions
• Describe the methods you use to analyse the data, and (if appropriate) to
design and compile the corpus
• Summarize the main quantitative (statistical) and/or qualitative tendencies;
you may include tables, charts, or both, but do not rely on these as a
substitute for discussion. Also include some example sentences and phrases
from the corpus, with comments (for example, sentences that illustrate typical
or unusual aspects of usage of a word)
• Use a good range of references from the corpus linguistics literature
• Evaluate the usefulness of the corpus methodology
• Give a word count at the end of the essay, just above the list of references.