This exercise is more open-ended than last week's. The goal is to get you familiar with different uses of the verb bake through an examination of corpus data, so that we have a foundation for probing its meaning together in the next class. In looking at the uses of bake, you should just focus on those uses that involve food and ignore those uses that involve the ground, clay, bricks, or baking yourself in the sun!
You should search for uses of bake using the instructions on the following page. Then look at the data you've collected and consider the following questions:
(1) What are some of the syntactic contexts that bake is found in? For instance, is it used as a transitive verb, an intransitive verb, or both? If both, is there a systematic relation between its transitive and intransitive uses? Does bake occur with certain kinds of prepositional phrases or in any other contexts that strike you as worthy of note?
(2) What are the foods that can be baked? Do they fall into any recognizable classes? You might also think about whether the same foods turn up in the various syntactic contexts, but don't put too much time into thinking about this.
(3) A more difficult question (just keep it in the back of your mind and we'll discuss it in class): The verb bake has often been described as a verb of change of state; does this characterization seem appropriate to you?
You are encouraged to look at and discuss the data in groups of two or three. If you want, each person in the group could start by looking at a distinct subset of the inflectional forms of bake (see below) and then you can pool your observations. You do not need to write up your results formally, but you should be ready to discuss what you have found in class.
As the primary source for data use the BNC (British National Corpus) web
site:
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
The BNC is preferable to COBUILD for this exercise because it gives you full sentences, which you'll need in order to examine the syntactic contexts that bake is found in.
To get the most useful data from the BNC, you should limit your search by part of speech. If you don't, you'll discover how common the noun bake is in cookbooks and how frequent "adjectival" uses of bake, such as baked potatoes and baking pans, are! Since the BNC doesn't have an equivalent of COBUILD's "@", which can be used to find all the inflected forms of a verb, you will have to search for each form individually. This requires knowing the part of speech tags associated with each inflected form and then carrying out a separate search for each of them. To simplify things, each of the verb/part of speech sequences that you will need to enter into the search query box is given below, together with an indication of which form of the verb it will find.
bake=VVB (finds present non-third person singular and imperative
uses of bake)
bake=VVI (finds infinitival uses of bake)
baked=VVD (finds past tense uses of bake)
baked=VVN (finds past participle uses of bake)
baking=VVG (finds present participle uses of bake)
bakes=VVZ (finds third person singular present uses of bake)
You only get up to 50 results at a time. If the results page indicates that there are a fair number more results for a particular form, you may repeat your search again if you want. Since the examples are chosen randomly, you are likely to get some, or even a lot, that you haven't seen before. You don't need to try and exhaust the data, however. Since several of you will be carrying out the searches, we should get pretty good coverage of the range of uses of bake across the class.
If you interested in seeing a full list of the part of speech tags used
in the BNC, look at:
http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/BNC/what/c5spec.html
For more detail on the tagging of the BNC, see:
http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/BNC/what/gramtag.html.
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Last modified: January 19, 2003 |