Jane Austen's peculiarity

[hh]

To come back to Richmond's opening post, one could think about using the following, avoiding complex offset constructions.

First collect word 1 of each item of a string (not too large, size adapted to your machine), where the itemdelimiter is "were" or any other word (conditional) that filters a targeted phrasing in or out.

Strings as itemdelimiters are possible in LC 7 (one may also use "split" and "combine" with such delimiters) and this is pretty fast.

This could narrow the lists and cases you have to investigate further.

Hermann

> Sun Aug 9 01:44:36 CEST 2015 by Alex Tweedly.
> I think I'd agree that a conditional clause should be equired (could it 
> be any of 'if', 'unless', 'whether', ...)?
> 
> Otherwise, you'd be finding false positives like:
> 
> I gave two shillings to my brother and last night they _were returned_ 
> to me.
> 
> -- Alex.
> 
>> Sat Aug 8 18:42:51 CEST 2015 by Richmond.
>> Jane Austen [amongst others] uses an interesting type of grammatical 
>> construction of this sort:
>> 
>> After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton to inquire if Mr. Wickham
>> _were returned_, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball.
>> 
>> Pride and Prejudice.
>> 
>> I would like to analyse a million word corpus that I have been granted 
>> access to for this type of construction.
>> 
>> However, I don't want to find examples of only 'were returned', but all 
>> examples of
>> 
>> were + infinitive / preterite / past participle
>> 
>> and, presumably for that I shall have to use wildcards . . .
>> 
>> OR ???
>> 
>> Richmond.