Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics

Book excerpt: The use of corpora has conventionally been envisioned as being either corpus-based or corpus-driven. While the formal definition of the latter term has been widely accepted since it was established by Tognini-Bonelli (2001), it is often applied to studies that do not, in fact, fullfil the fundamental requirement of a theory-neutral starting point. This volume proposes the term pattern-driven as a more precise alternative. The chapters illustrate a variety of methods that fall under this broad methodology, such as the extraction of lexical bundles, POS-grams and semantic frames, and demonstrate how these approaches can uncover new understandings of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena.