Hello everyone. Welcome to Big Data and Language. Last time, we've learned about BNC Corpus, which one is British National Corpus. So you might be wondering what will be the other English corpus. So let me introduce another corpus, which is based on American English. So are you ready? Let's get started. Based on the American English, we can use our corpus, the name is COCA. COCA stands for Corpus of Contemporary American English. Let me explain more about COCA. COCA is the largest freely available corpus of English, because that one contains 560 million words of text, and 20 million words are updated every year, from 1990 until 2017. This one is the large and balanced corpus of American English. There are many genres, registers such as; spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and other academic texts. The format is very similar. So I want to introduce the task. So feel free to search COCA on Google, and you can use the similar function for solving these tasks. So let me explain the task. Please use COCA in order to solve these activities. Activity 1, when writing in English, it's rather important that you do not use the same words again and again. So you may have several options. You need several options to use other synonyms instead of using the same words again and again. What will be done most frequently, like the situations that you use the same words again and again. Maybe one of the words that you use a lot in your daily conversation would be "very." That lecture was very impressive. The movie was very interesting. So you might want to use other words instead of very. Let me give you four different sentences. So you need to find the synonyms to use instead of very in order to use that adverb with other adjectives. Let me give you the first sentence. The first sentence is; The report was very critical of the railways poor safety record. So you can see that the critical is bold, so with the adjective critical, what adverb can we use-instead of very. Think about the synonym. The synonym means, the same meaning but different words. So very emphasizes or modifies critical. What will be the other words that we can use instead of very? Please go to COCA and find other synonyms. Let me move to the second sentence. The second sentence is; This development proved very significant for the whole town. So instead of very significant, you might want to use other adverbs that modify the adjective significant. Again, feel free to play with different functions on COCA and find the words. Now, let's move to the third sentence. The third sentence; His poetry reflects the fact that he was a very religious person. Instead of very, what kind of adverb can we use with the adjective religious. The fourth sentence is; Good thing you didn't come to the lecture today, it was very boring. So this one is one of the excerpts from the daily conversation, I guess. So instead of very boring, what would be the good adverb can we use with adjective boring. I already explained in the BNC activity, BNC task. So you might notice that, already how to find the answers with what kind of function. But if not, please take your time and please complete the task one. Now, let me introduce the second activity. Activity 2 is; which are more commonly used collocations with the following expressions? So there are several situations that you might want to congrats, or you might want to say your message in any sad situations. So for example, you might want to say congratulations. Somebody gets promoted or somebody gets an award, you might want to say congratulations, but this one is not enough. You might want to emphasize your word congratulations with something. So congratulations, what would be the good word before congratulations? So you can express your feelings more. The second example is, condolences. What kind of words modify condolences, so you can express your feelings better or more, with emphasis. So again, feel free to go to Coca and try to find the collocations. One with congratulations and one with condolences. Take your time, and once you complete these two tasks, please move to the next video. I will explain how you can solve these two tasks. So good luck.
