Re: Unsuccessful BNC word search

Hi Linda

Yes, as BNC was mainly compiled by 1994, most of the occurrences will
actually be from the 
period before 'ordinary people' started using email.

http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
will give you 40 examples (type "e+mail"), plus a collocation
list
if you want it, + 11 examples for "email" (surely now the
preferred form?).

You may get even more current usage examples from
http://www.webcorp.org.uk/ 
Or from
http://www.highbeam.com/library/index.asp

Best
Ramesh

At 20:56 21/05/2006, Linda Bawcom wrote:
> Dear friends, colleagues and
> list members,
>  
> I have two sentences from two separate newspaper articles:
>  
> The e-mail indicated that they were going scuba diving off the
> coast of Thailand.
>  
> The message indicated that they were going to be scuba diving off
> the coast of Thailand.
>  
> For the moment, though interesting, my concern is not with the change of
> tense. My problem is finding strings with 'e-mail'.  The BNC's 60
> examples seem to be almost entirely from computer magazines (although I
> haven't checked David Lee's Index) and so discuss  functions of
> e-mail and similar and are of no use to me. My own small corpus only has
> this one instance; and of course, earlier corpora does not have this
> word.
>  
> Any advice would be very much appreciated and I wouldn't mind buying the
> corpus/corpora (providing it's within reason for a single researcher). My
> apologies for not keeping prior e-mails that discussed different corpora.
> In my certitude that the BNC would be all I needed, I deleted them (well,
> live and learn).  
>  
> Kindest regards (from Liverpool at the moment),
> Linda 
>  
>  
>
>
> "
> Any man's death
> diminishes me because I am involved in mankind." John
> Donne

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building]
Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp