Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - Endre Abkarovits: Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns. Volumes 1 and 2.

ENDRE ABKAROVITS COLLINS COBUILD GRAMMAR PATTERNS 1 AND 2 Since the late eighties many linguists and ordinary teachers of English have followed the developments of the COBUILD project with great interest. For the first time in the history of lexicography, the COBUILD staff used a computational database when compiling the first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, published in 1987. This was followed by the various grammar and usage books, all of which tried to exploit the potentials of the rapidly expanding corpus. By the time of the second edition of the dictionary in 1995 the number of data stored in the Birmingham computer centre was ten times bigger than eight years before: 200 million words from spoken and written, British and American English. (The corpus now comprises 330 million words, with plans to expand it to 400 million during 1999.) Anyone who has ever had a chance to get access to their corpus once or occasionally must have felt how much it would be necessary for most linguists and teachers of English to have regular access to the data, preferably in an electronic on-line way, or at least to the results of some analysis in a printed form. The latter might be preferred especially by people who have some aversion to new technical devices or those who can't afford to subscribe to the use of the database, but the results of some systematic analysis of the corpus should also be of interest for those who use the database more or less regularly, but do research in some other field of computational linguistics. The results of computer-assisted linguistic research concerning the typical patterns of English verbs, nouns and adjectives have been summarized by the COBUILD linguists in two volumes in recent years. 'Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs' was published in 1996 when their database (The Bank of English) stood at 250 million words. It was followed two years later by 'Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives' at the time of the 350 million-strong corpus. The former was complemented by a practice book in 1997. ('Verbs: Patterns and Practice') It offers teachers ideas in what ways the grammar patterns could be exploited. As there hasn't been sufficient time since the pattern books came out (and they aren't even available in most Hungarian bookshops), the aim of the 185