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

clearly preferred. The table may prove that we should have some information and explanation whether there is a tendency to prefer one form or they are equally common. with accusative pronoun with possessive pronoun appreciate 28 34 enjoy 1 13 excuse 7 5 fancy 11 1 forget 6 2 forgive 3 7 imagine 205 10 mind 40 38 miss 9 4 pardon 0 4 remember 481 44 (The table shows figures from the 50 million corpus, which can be reached through subscription. I have chosen to examine only the pronoun form, because finding the 's genitive form of nouns in the corpus is fairly complicated and the occurrence of the genitive noun is even less likely than that of the possessive pronoun.) 3 The -ing form in (he reference hooks of the past few years What I was interested in was whether with the development of technology, when it has become possible to gain statistical data and frequency indicators from a computerised database and in this way to come to more objective conclusions, the information of the new generation of reference books has become more unanimous in this respect or not. I have examined four major learner's dictionaries (Oxford, Cambridge, Longman, COBUILD), which were all published in 1995, along with some other reference books of the same publishers before and after 1995. Here are the results: The symbols for the constructions: 1: verb + -ing form 2: verb + accusative + -ing form 3: verb + possessive + -ing form 84