Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics

The chapters in this volume showcase the flexibility and wide applicability of corpus-driven methods to the study of a variety of linguistic questions within and beyond the core question of lexical patterns and the repetitiveness of their occurrence. Our main theoretical objective is to suggest that the bottom-up approach is not only something made possible by increasing computational power, but that it also changes our perception and understanding of how language is constructed and how it functions in specific contexts. Thus corpus-driven methods become a crucially important tool that many more linguists would benefit from experimenting with. To that end, all the chapters explain in detail how the theoretical model is constructed and how it fits in with the proposed research question, and then apply the methods in practice to authentic, previously unexplored, corpus data. Each chapter thus provides a demonstration of a selected corpus-driven method and also provide new and exciting findings in its own field.