I role a corpus all the fourth dimension when I’m writing – to banking concern check how a word’s typically used, its strongest collocates or only to facial expression for inspiration for event sentences. And most of the time, what comes upward is more-or-less what I’d expect. Sometimes there’s a collocation I hadn’t idea of, but it’s rarely really surprising. Just occasionally though I’m a fleck taken aback past times what the corpus reveals …
This week, I was working on to a greater extent than or less elementary vocab practise activities (for B1 level) in addition to I was looking for examples to illustrate the describing word crowded. So I did a quick corpus search to run into which nouns it typically modifies. I wasn’t surprised to find:
crowded + street, market, room, area, place, train, etc.
Crowded market seemed similar a squeamish prototypical context which would endure tardily for most learners to visualize, then I clicked through to browse to a greater extent than or less examples. In scrolling through the cites, I came across ii slightly surprising trends:
The metaphorical: a large chunk of the examples were for the metaphorical, concern feel of a market, rather than the physical house amongst stalls selling goods. I works life lots of companies struggling to compete inwards an already crowded marketplace for unloosen energy or cars or whatever. It reminded me that all also oftentimes nosotros forget close the really mutual metaphorical uses of words in addition to chunks inwards English, assuming that because the learner recognizes the basic, oftentimes concrete pregnant of an item, they’ll automatically selection upward on a metaphorical usage too.
The distressing reflection: the other flurry of uses was to a greater extent than of a distressing reflection of the the world nosotros alive inwards (and the intelligence media who study it), amongst lots of examples of bombs going off inwards the middle of crowded markets. It made me wonder close the connotations inwards dissimilar cultures attached to things nosotros tend to persuasion in addition to acquaint equally neutral in addition to harmless.
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