Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 December 20

= December 20 =

"(a) little good news"
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson said "there is a little good news for the prime minister" when he had intended to say "there is little good news ...". Commenting on his mistake he remarked what a large difference a single small word makes. Is the difference on account of the two grammatical constructions (too subtle for me to grasp) or is it more the way the two phrases have developed in meaning over the years? With British understatement "little good news" tends to suggest there is no good news at all whereas "a little good news" suggests there may be substantial good news but we are not going to emphasise it. Thincat (talk) 09:09, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * "A little" means "some", while "little" means none or next to none. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:28, 20 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Little and few on their own have negative polarity, whereas a little and a few do not. The same can be true of the adjective slight, though I don't think this case is so clear-cut. --ColinFine (talk) 11:07, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah ha. Now I look at Wiktionary it describes "a little" as an adverb so I now see the first example could be reworded to "there is slightly good news ...". Thincat (talk) 11:15, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * In the misspoken sentence, it is not an adverb but a determiner, meaning "a small amount of&thinsp;": "there is a small amount of good news ...&thinsp;". --Lambiam 11:40, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * When I was at school we had adverbs but no such things as determiners! Thincat (talk) 12:00, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * The label is a relatively new invention, grouping a somewhat disparate bunch of things together that happen to behave similarly in the grammar of noun phrases. I am sure, though, that also in your golden school days some as in "some animals are more equal than others", however it was labelled, was not considered an adverb. --Lambiam 13:15, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * No, they were adjectives. Articles were also considered a type of adjective. --184.144.97.125 (talk) 23:55, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Words that go with other words
I've tried searching, but I don't really know if there's a name for what I'm thinking of. Basically, I am looking for a way to search for words based on how often they appear with another word. For example, if I looked up the word "pepper" I would like to see which words most commonly precede or follow it. I would expect things like "hot", "chili", "ground", "jalapeno", and so on. — Aᴋʀᴀʙʙıᴍ talk 14:42, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * In French, there is a famous reference work called the "Dictionnaire des cooccurences" which does precisely this. The equivalent term in English is co-occurrence, but I've never heard of a similar dictionary. Xuxl (talk) 15:10, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * That link led me to GloWbE, which has a "collocates" button. Not sure how to use it (requires free registration). Card Zero  (talk) 15:50, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Onelook can do this. I think there are also data sets out there for linguists (I forget the name for these) but that's getting a bit advanced. Edit: I was thinking of parsed corpora, also apparently known as treebanks. Edit 2: you can get a longer list out of Onelook (including "ground pepper") if you click "all", but there will also be a certain amount of garbage like "bird pepper 1. cayenne pepper", whatever that means. There's also a link to rank them by commonness, supposedly. Card Zero  (talk) 15:13, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
 * To be precise, a OneLook search term like "* pepper" gives you a list of terms that have an entry in one of the dictionaries covered, which need not agree with the occurrence rate. The search term "* threshold" produces 106%. It does not mention 106%, which is more common than most of these. --Lambiam 21:48, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

You may be thinking of collocation. — Kpalion(talk) 15:48, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

You're looking for a concordance, something like the Birmingham one. There's a basic, user-friendly alternative here, if your needs are less serious. HenryFlower 16:17, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

In addition to what others have said, in natural language processing, such word combinations are called bigrams (when they're the object of statistical word processing etc). Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:47, 20 December 2021 (UTC)


 * "Michelle, ma belle, these are words that go together well,très bien ensemble." MinorProphet (talk) 19:15, 20 December 2021 (UTC)


 * You can sort of hack google ngram for this by using the wildcard * item, but because of the scale of the chart you'll just get an idea of the most common two-word phrases rather than an exhaustive list (I think, am not an ngram wrangler). Here's search for binomes with pepper as first and as second element: * pepper, pepper * 70.67.193.176 (talk) 17:07, 21 December 2021 (UTC)