Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Endre Abkarovits: The -ing form after finite verbs in the reference books of the nineties

interested only in contemporary English. Different varieties of the written language, transcriptions of the spoken language were put into the database and the data were examined with the help of everdeveloping retrieval methods. Nothing was accepted, unless it was supported by data of their own database. They introduced a so-called extra column, first mainly for information on grammar. Looking back from the point of view of today's wealth of data (which I still don't find sufficient), it seems that the first edition was based on a relatively small corpus. The second edition in 1995 saw a tenfold increase in the database. In this way far safer conclusions were made possible than had been in the case of the first edition. By this time other publishers also had to realise that unless they can claim that their dictionary is also based on authentic examples, which had been analysed carefully, they were not able to sell them. Their approach might be different, but by now all major learner's dictionaries claim to have some corpus of their own (or shared with another publisher), even if some of them seem only to use them to illustrate their preconceptions with authentic examples, while others - especially COBUILD - try to deduce all their conclusions from their data. Besides having a database all publishers try to introduce novelties and the 1995 editions of four major learner's dictionaries competed in offering features not usual until then. (Frequency bands, culture pages, 'false friends', etc.) Along with the new editions of the dictionaries the same publishers also continued bringing out new grammar and usage books. Some of them (again especially in the case of COBUILD) were also the fruits of computer-assisted linguistic research, while others followed traditional methods. With all these developments I thought it would be useful to return to a topic in which I became interested at the end of the eighties. At that time I examined the occurrence of various non-fmite constructions after transitive verbs in the function of the object (complement), as described by 12 major reference books of the time. In that paper I also tried to find out the possibility of the choice between infinitive and -ing form. In the present paper I will concentrate only on the latter and the problem of the logical subject of the -ing form. 82