| As the accessibility of a large corpus, such as on-line COBUILDdirect, which is a 50M word subset of the Bank of English, has been growing, it has become much easier even for researchers living in Japan to make corpus-based studies of English usage. In Britain, major dictionary publishers have professed that they used computer corpora to compile their ESL/EFL dictionaries, which has created a situation where it is difficult to publish a new dictionary that is not corpus-based.
This article describes how effective it is to take a corpus-based approach to research in English usage and lexicography in Japan. It focuses on Mi-score and t-score, which are statistical techniques available on COBUILDdirect, providing a collocational analysis of alive and living. The analysis gives a description of the tendency of alive to be chosen when unexpectedness or extraordinariness is implied, and of living to be chosen when the distinction between life and death is implied. It is suggested that more appropriate descriptions of semantic features of words can be realized than in usage books or ESL/EFL dictionaries ever published as long as proper use is made of corpora in a real sense.
|