Sure of and Sure about in Corpora and ChatGPT

Abstract

The ultimate goal of this paper is to compare sure of and sure about in the TV Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and ChatGPT. A point to note with respect to the TV Corpus is that sure about was more frequently used in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, whereas sure of was more widely used in the UK and Ireland. A further point to note is that sure of and sure about were the most preferred by six countries’ celebrities in the 2010s. With respect to the COCA, it is worth noting that sure of it and sure of victory are the most frequently used (12 tokens), followed by sure of things (10 tokens), and sure of success (9 tokens), in that order, whereas sure about things is the most widely used (8 tokens) and followed by sure about people. It is also worthwhile noting that only 2 of 42 nouns are the collocations of both sure of and sure about in the analysis of the COCA (the top 22). Simply put, sure of is 4.76% the same as sure about in the analysis of the top 22. Finally, it is interesting to point out that 8 of 36 nouns (22.22%) are the collocations of both sure of and sure about in the data of the ChatGPT (the top 22). It can thus be inferred that sure of and sure about have a low similarity.