Conjugational Patterns and Text Categories in the LOB Corpus
Takeshi Okada · 2002
This paper discusses the significance of examining text categories in the LOB Corpus within a detailed framework based on verb conjugation patterns. An automatic computational procedure to generate a complete table covering all the possible conjugation patterns of the 3,854 verbs contained in the corpus is presented first. For each possible conjugation pattern, typical verbs are picked up. After selecting both typical and peculiar verbs for each conjugation pattern, their distributions across 15 text categories in the corpus are investigated next. At this point, some conjugational properties peculiar to the spoken corpus such as SEC can be observed in the Imaginative Prose in the LOB Corpus. The distributional properties of typical verbs also support the validity of categorical distinction, especially between fiction and other genres. Finally, an additional investigation of the correlation between the conjugational patterns and the semantic distinction among the common verbs presented in LGSWE (Biber et al. 1999) is presented.