D3X73R

In blogging, I rely a lot on the Global Web-Based English corpus, GloWBE , which has millions of words of internet data categori{z/s}ed by the country of the website. It's divided into excerpts from 'blogs' (which includes comments on blogs) and 'general', which includes all sorts of things, even some blogs. It's an invaluable tool for judging whether a word or phrasing is used in a particular place. But national borders are very weak on the internet, and commenters comment on all kinds of things from all kinds of places. And there are even people like me who are blogging in the 'wrong' country for their dialect (and I have run into some of my own writing in the corpus!). So, how can we know how much of the data that's in the 'US' category is actually by Americans and so forth? This is a problem that has struck me as I've tried to use GloWBE data to research politeness markers. (I'm giving a paper on please in GloWBE next week .) So,...

Yesterday, The Syntactician was asking me questions about semantic terminology in relation to particular uses of the verb know , as one does. And so, as one does, I looked for know in the indices of various books about verbs that I have, hoping to find a term that would suit her particular purposes. In doing so, I came across something that was completely new to me in F. R. Palmer's A linguistic study of the English verb (1965): In case you can't read the photo, it says that you can 'help someone do something' or you can 'help someone to do something'.  So far, so familiar to me. But then it goes on to say that know has the same pattern with   (1)  Have you ever known them come on time? and (2)  Have you ever known them to come on time? Now, if I have ever seen sentences of type (1) in the wild, I must have assumed them to have typos, because if I want to know someone/thing + verb , I must have the the to- infinitive form of the verb. Yes to (2), no to (1). ...