to elaborate

... thesis I have chose to elaborate on the questions of annotation

There are no instances of question appearing within five words to the right of elaborate (vb ). See the wordsketch of elaborate.

At dictionary.com, the first definition of the verb is to work out carefully or minutely; develop to perfection, which is the meaning intended by the student. The second definition is to add details to; expand, which is actually what elaborate on means - this is how much weight the preposition carries. I have a feeling that elaborate is used less in current English in the first sense, however data from both corpora suggests otherwise.

In the BNC, there are 11 instances of elaborating a point, 8 of which are passive, e.g., These points are elaborated elsewhere. In the NMC, there are only 2 instances of elaborating a point, both active. There are dozens of verbs used much more frequently with point (noun).

More significantly, when semantically clustered, we see the following objects of elaborate:

NMC: concept 3 theory 4 self 2 idea 6 movement 3 view 2 point 2

BNC: concept 6 notion 2 theory 6 argument 3 principle 3 idea 5 view 4 analysis 2 rule 2 model 2 account 2

The objects of elaborate on in NMC are aspect, nature, idea, view and point.

In BNC, they are answer, reason, concept, theory, idea, point, detail feature, division. Only idea is common to both lists.

In the table above, we can see that in the older BNC, 16% of the uses of elaborate are with on, whereas in the more modern NMC, it is used in 25% of the cases.

This is a lot of chatter about the different uses of the word in the two corpora, but it supports my impression that the use of the word is changing. It is unlikely, however, that in my lifetime, the first meaning will disappear.

If the student really wants to use the word question(s) of in this context, studying the verbs that accompany question is likely to be fruitful.