Posted by InJen · May 11, 2012 · 6 replies
There is a professor who understands Confucius.
He is alive.
There was another man three hundred years ago who undestood Confucius. He is dead.
so:
there are/were two persons understanding Confucius.
which verb should be used?
( the sentence structure 'he is ..., so was...' I find it impossible to use)
Here you could rephrase it as : There have only ever been two people with a good understanding of Confucius' philosophy : XXX, who lived in the Xth century and XXXX, who teaches at the university of XXX. Or whatever the details are. It's the same problem as before - the lack of a single verb for both people. So I've replaced ..who understood/understand with the noun phrase : with a good understanding of
thank you vey much.
I always use AT university, as you did, and the Oxford collocation dictionary only includes AT as a preposition preceding UNIVERSITY, but dictionaries may not be comprehensive enough, and sometimes I see IN university; is it acceptable?( I only know IN and AT are acceptable for SCHOOL, with a difference in American and British Usage
I fed them into a concordancer (CORPUS CONCORDANCE ENGLISH) and got ten examples of "at university" as opposed to none of "in university". However, I got 17 examples of "in college" as opposed to 10 of "at college". Broken down by variety, the results were :
at university - all British English
in college - all but one Am. Eng.
at college - mixed, but twice as many Brit Eng than Am Eng.
I was expecting to find "in school" in Am Eng referring to both grade school and university, but in fact all the examples that came up were for grade school.
could you tell me what a concordancer is?
I do not know how to use it and the result yields nothing
A concordancer is a software programme which analyses a corpus of material to see how frquent words and phrases are, what collocations occur etc. To use the lexTutor concordancer to find the results that I mentioned :
a) click on the link.
b) at university (or whatever word/phrase you want to analyse) into the box
c) move to "Choose a corpus". if you want to check Am.Eng click on Brown; If you want written Brit.Eng, click on BNC written; if you want spoken Brit.Eng, click on BNC spoken. Or you can click on All of the above if you don't need to distinguish the variety - try that first. (The other corpora on the list give you the possibility to check specialist uses like Medical or Legal English).
d) Click on Get concordance. You'll see a list of all the uses of "at university" in the corpora you have chosen.
There are other boxes but ignore them for now - they give you more advanced options.
thank you very much
