Note on Examples

One of the really unusual features of this grammar is that all the examples are chosen from the Birmingham corpora of texts. There is a central collection of about twenty million words, supplemented by many other sources of current English, including The Times newspaper. I believe this to be a sound basis for a grammar, and I think that it is very important for learners and other users to examine and study only reel instances of a language. This is particularly important when they are using the examples as models for their own usage.

Some great grammars of English—for example Otto Jespersen's A Modern English Grammar—support each statement with citations from published books, just as the major dictionaries of English do. This provides hard evidence for the statements, and gives important information in the surrounding context.

There is no justification for inventing examples. To illustrate a simple subject-verb clause, something like 'Birds sing' is not good enough. With the Cobuild database it is not difficult to find examples even of a fairly rare event like this structure. 'Trains stopped' is a genuine example, and so is 'Frey agreed'. Even in a two-word structure it can be seen that the real examples have a commutative value that the invented one lacks. However, the job of searching shows us how rare such a structure is, and makes us wonder if it should be prominent in a grammar.

It is sad that many teachers seem doomed to work with invented material. However, I would like to make a distinction between the formal presentation of an instance of a language, and the quick, informal examples that teachers have to produce from their own resources many times a day, without warning. The latter are not intended as reliable models to follow, but as explanations of a specific point. The teacher will, and must, rely on personal competence, just as a teacher of any other subject will call on memory rather than look everything up.

There is a big difference between this and putting into print as an example of usage a stretch of English that is not known to have been used. The mind plays tricks, and, specially, is unreliable when one is thinking about very short utterances, without a clear context to support them. Perhaps the biggest single improvement for language teaching is the ability of the computer to find and organize real examples.

Our experience in the classroom with real examples is that learners have a lot less difficulty with them than is often supposed. These examples, after all, are the kind of material that the learner will have to understand eventually; learners appreciate and know instinctively how to cope with the loose ends of natural examples; they know they can trust them and learn directly from them.

The independence of real examples is their strength. They are carefully selected instances of good usage. A set of real examples may show, collectively, aspects of the language that are not obvious individually.

The moment work stops, disorder is liable to freak out.

If he gets promoted, all hell will break out.

This caused an epidemic to break out among them.

This final destructive fever had to break out somewhere.

Note that it is bad things that break out, not good ones. Any such points emerging from a set of constructed examples could not, of course, be trusted.

People who work with languages should be open to what they can learn from this new source of information. There is no doubt at all that new language teaching materials will rely more and more on the evidence from large text stores, and that in a few years' time teachers will look back and wonder how they coped with the lifeless examples they used to work with. This book, along with the Cobuild Dictionaries and the Cobuild English Course, gives a first glimpse of what it is like to have access to real examples.

John Sinclair

Editor-in-Chief

Cobuild

Professor of Modern English Language

University of Birmingham