B39

This text represents a concatenation of BNC files J7U and J7V, two
short documents of similar type, which have been put together to 
make one file of the normal length for polished adult writing in
the LUCY Corpus.  Each document is a book review from _Language
and Literature_, vol. 2, no. 1, Longman Group UK Ltd, Harlow, 1993; 
the first (J7U) was contributed
by Lance St John Butler, the second (J7V) by John McRae.

Because these documents form separate files in BNC, the BNC s-unit
numbering starts from 1 in each case.  In order to give unique
s-unit numbers within the LUCY file, the s-units in BNC file J7U
are numbered from 10001 rather than 00001, and those in BNC file J7V
from 20001 rather than 00001.


10017  In the clich "as she is spoke", the word "spoke" is intended to 
represent a nonstandard dialect past participle form, equivalent to
standard "spoken", although "spoke" is only a past tense in standard
English.  By 3.67, the form is tagged here as a past participle.  For
the CHRISTINE analyses of spoken English, a different approach was 
adopted to wordtagging nonstandard usage, but for a case like this cropping
up in the middle of standard written prose it will be best to stick to
the approach of Sampson (1995).
  However, neither approach leads to any very clear guidelines for the
nonstandard phrase "to was" in s-unit 10018 -- we have read the passage
in Maugham's _Cakes and Ale_, but nothing in the context makes it 
clear whether he believed that this was the Cockney equivalent for "to be",
or some special tensed infinitive construction which does not occur in
the standard language at all; and we are very sceptical whether such usage
has ever occurred outside Maugham's imagination.  So in this case "was"
is given its standard wordtag, though the "to" is taken as justifying
the phrase subcategory Vi.

10018  BNC represents the marks for the beginning and end of the quoted
sentence, and the apostrophe in "I'm", all as &quot;, suggesting that they
were identical symbols, but this is much more likely to be a failure by
the automatic processing routines used in compiling BNC than to be a
misprint in the original.  LUCY normalizes the punctuation.

10018  "Somerset Maughan" -> "Somerset Maugham"

20028  "Univers ities" -> "Universities"  (Note that it seems likely that
there would have been a line break or other division between the personal
name and university affiliation, but the BNC file gives no indication of
such.)
