Frequency of go + particles

Here are the charts for go + particles for both spoken and written data in the three corpora followed by their matching tables, which I will again discuss one at a time.

After the discussion on frequency counts I will move on to the semantic discussion of go down, go in, go on and go out occur.

Chart 5

Spoken data for go + particles

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Table 10 (Go + particles in the spoken data)

ICE-K ICE-T ICE-GB

Chart 5 above together with table 6 show clear variation also in the use of

go+particles in the creation of particle verbs. As can be seen, there are again some significant differences in the frequencies of some particle verbs even within a single

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corpora. The frequencies also differ between the three corpora to a large extent.

Firstly, with go down, ICE-K resulted in 23, 1 cases/mio, with ICE-T having 46, 8 cases/mio. However, in ICE-GB there were 73, 7 instances of come down per mio.

Thus, this particular particle verb is least used in KenE. Still, it is more frequent in the ICE-EA than the other verbs (come, get) with the particle down.

Continuing with the analysis of the next combination, go in, it appears to be fairly rare in ICE-T which results in only 4, 7 cases/mio in the spoken corpus (or one instance in total). ICE-GB with the biggest frequencies has 32, 9 cases/mio while ICE-K has 25, 6 cases/mio. However, no conclusion can be drawn until the semantic analysis of go in.

Next, go off gives fairly low frequencies for both ICE-K and ICE-T: 7, 7/mio and 9, 4/mio accordingly. In ICE-GB, however, go off occurs 50, 2 times/mio. Thus, there seems to be a fairly big difference in how often this particular verb combination is used in EAfE and in BrE. This again reflects the use of other verb + off combinations studied earlier in this thesis. It seems that off as a particle is fairly rare in the EAfE.

The next particle verb, namely go on is fairly well presented in all of the three corpora. ICE-K has 166, 7 instances/mio while the equivalent figures for ICE-T and ICE-GB are 163, 7/mio and 313, 7/mio. With these figures go on is the most frequent particle verb in the investigated combinations of go + particles.

The fourth particle verb, go out, has 107, 7 cases/mio in the ICE-GB but only 28, 1/mio in ICE-T. The ICE-GB again gives the highest frequency for go out: 142, 7/mio.

Finally, go up is fairly rare in both of the ICE-EA components: ICE-K has 15, 4 cases/mio and ICE-T 28, 1/mio. In addition, similarly to go off, the frequencies in the ICE-T exceed those in the ICE-K. Moreover, with the ICE-GB the same victorious

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tendency continues: go up appears there 106, 7 times/mio making this particle verb the third most frequent in this group. Next I will continue on explaining the results reported in table 7 beneath on the written data of go+particles.

Chart 6

Written data for go + particles

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Written tot.freq for Go Written freq/mio for Go

ICE-K ICE-T ICE-GB

Table 11 (Go + particles in the written data)

ICE-K ICE-T ICE-GB

Overall, the same tendency seems to continue that was already perceived in the spoken data of the ICE-GB, in particular. In other words, the frequencies in the written data are remarkably lower. With the ICE-K and ICE-T this tendency is not so noticeable although with some particle verbs the frequencies are lower that those in the spoken data.

Regarding the first particle verb, go down, the ICE-T presents the highest

frequencies with 32, 4 cases/mio. The next highest frequencies are in the ICE-K (27,

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4/mio) leaving ICE-GB last with only 18, 9 instances of go down per mio. With the ICE-K the frequencies for go down are even slightly higher than in the spoken data where there were 23, 1 cases/mio. However, the ICE-GB for its side has remarkably lower frequencies here than those found in the spoken data: 72, 1 instances of go down/mio.

The next verb, go in, is found only three times in the ICE-K, giving a normalised frequency of 7, 5/mio. In the ICE-T there are 12, 4 cases/mio. The ICE-GB also has only 18, 9 cases/mio. Thus, this might suggest that the use of go in concentrates on spoken or more colloquial language. The frequencies in the spoken data however are not notable enough to really state anything conclusive on this.

With go off the frequencies are also extremely low with both the K and ICE-T: only 2, 5/mio in both (or one single case in total). Instead, the ICE-GB has 33 cases/ mio. A similar tendency with go off was already perceivable in the written corpora regarding both ICE-K and ICE-T. Thus, in the written corpus their use is even rarer – one could claim that this particle verb is nearly non-existent in the ICE-EA while in the ICE-GB it clearly exists.

Contrary to these figures, the particle verb, go on, yields fairly high frequencies in all of the three corpora of written texts. In addition, in the ICE-K and ICE-T there does not seem to be any clear difference in frequencies on how go on is used in the spoken and written corpora. There are 139, 4 cases/mio in the written data of ICE-K while in the spoken data there were 166, 7 cases/mio. In the ICE-T the figures are 124, 5/mio for written and 163, 7/mio for spoken. However, the ICE-GB has only 96, 8 instances/mio in the written data while in the spoken one the frequencies were as high as 313, 7/mio.

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Continuing on the next verb, namely go out, the normalized frequencies for written corpora of both the ICE-K and ICE-T are practically the same: 32,3/mio for ICE-K and 34,9/mio for ICE-T while in the ICE-GB figures are 54,3/mio. However, the results concerning ICE-T cause some surprise, since here the frequencies for go out are higher than those in the spoken data (28, 1 cases/mio). There also was a clear difference in the total number of cases: in spoken data there were only 6 cases of go out whereas in the written data the number was 14. However, one must wait for the semantic analysis of this particle verb before drawing any further conclusions on the use of this particular verb + particle combination.

With the last particle verb go up, it is with the ICE-K that the results are somewhat puzzling. In the written data there are 19, 9 instances/mio of go up while in the spoken data the figures were 15, 4/mio. Thus, concerning go up in KenE, its use seems to be almost equally frequent in both spoken and written English. Finally the results for ICE-T and ICE-GB both give lower frequencies in the written data, namely 22, 4/mio for the previously mentioned and 26 cases/mio for the ICE-GB.

6.3.2 Semantic Analysis of go down, go in, go on, and go out