Investigating Language Use Through Corpusbased Analyses of Association Patterns
Douglas Biber · International Journal of Corpus Linguistics · 1996
The present paper argues that analyses of language use provide an important complementary perspective to traditional linguistic descriptions, and that empirical approaches are required for such investigations. Corpus-based techniques are particularly well suited to these research purposes, enabling investigation of research questions that were previously disregarded. Specifically, the paper discusses the use of corpus-based techniques to identify and analyze complex "association patterns": the systematic ways in which linguistic features are used in association with other linguistic and non-linguistic features. Several illustrative analyses are discussed, investigating the use of lexical features, grammatical features, and the overall patterns of variability among texts and registers.