I’m spending the weekend working on gathering data for my degree essay, which I’m now definitely writing on dialect effects on polysemy - comparing ‘knock off’ in American and British English. At the moment my work consists of going through the British National Corpus and the American equivalent, COCA, collecting examples. Look at my awesome syntax for searching: [[knock]].[v*] * [nn*] [off].

I’m looking at press, fiction and my favourite (as well as my most hated) category - spoken conversation. Spoken conversation is easily the most amusing and confusing stuff:

I thought aye aye! Water’s gone out of bag. I turned round and it were all right at back of my jeans! D’ ya know, I thought she said that I weren’t coming I knocked the pipe off back. and it comes out of hoover. Yeah. And it’s squirting all over my pigging leg!

 My pigging leg! ♥ How can you not love that?

Coding it is going to be trickier, though. Not thinking about that yet.