Yes there is and it seems you put a recognised operator at the end, to specify the part of grammar you are interested in.. I need about a day to familiarise myself with the literature. I do not use N-gram myself.

this is an experiment with a result that should never occur which it didn't

if,should,verb

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=if%2Cshould…

I think this shows the word verb with if or should but there is a way to specify the usage.

I believe you have to play around with these tags and the wildcard tag *

if * = if plus common.

the tag list:

_NOUN_These tags can either stand alone (_PRON_)

or can be appended to a word (she_PRON)

_VERB

__ADJ_adjective

_ADV_adverb

_PRON_pronoun

_DET_determiner or article

_ADP_an adposition: either a preposition or a postposition

_NUM_numeral

_CONJ_conjunction

_PRT_particle

_ROOT_root of the parse treeThese tags must stand alone (e.g., _START_)_START_start of a sentence_END_end of a sentence

you have to type _VERB whatever you are interested in, with the underline at the front _DET etc

And in any case you will get views now there is one view up here for others to follow, that's what humans do.

This is assuming google n-gram and not Stanford university or other similar n-gram tools.

Michael:

The conditional "should" is the one that you use in place of "if": "Should it rain tomorrow, the match will be cancelled."

My first thought is to think about the surrounding words. “Should” as a modal verb is followed by a verb; “should” as a conditional is followed by a noun, pronoun, or determiner. It’s impossible to do a search for “should” with all nouns, but you can look up instances of its usage with each pronoun and determiner: “should I”, “should my”, “should the”, etc.

To create comparable results for “if”, you can add the same controls: “if I”, “if my”, “If the”, etc.

The total results will exclude the incidences of “should" and “if” followed by a plural, uncountable noun, or proper noun. But it should be a good enough representative for comparison.

EDIT: I just realized that “should” as a modal verb can be followed a noun/pronoun/determiner in a question, so that would affect the results.

Unfortunately, the n-gram tool is just a word search with no knowledge of grammar.

That would be possible but you may have to run several searches and the documentation/literature/the handbook-manual available on the internet unfortunately like all computer algorithm language is not clear.

It would at first glance involve the use of forcing the algorithm to work how you want it by (putting in parentheses) and adding a limiter to the query.

I suggest you use Stanford universities N-gram or other university/ language institute/ AI language learning N-gram tools. Google only scans the books it has scanned into a database for use in its google books service. Therefore google's public N-Gram it has limited corpus compared with the experts in this field.

It will be should? be possible but the expression you need to type in will be complicated and not natural English it will be like something from a computer program. To get your result in one search, I am not familiar with that type of searching and usage of language databases.