English sit, stand, and lie in small and large corpora
Sally Rice, John M. B. Newman · 2001
We explore the usage of the cardinal English posture verbs sit, stand, and lie relying on a number of corpora of English with a view towards establishing quantitative and qualitative differences for these search items across relatively small and relatively large corpora. Frequencies of these verbs in various con-texts were compared, as well as the range of correlates found in some selected constructions. Our results reveal a high degree of consistency between all the corpora for frequency of occurrence of the posture verbs. However, only the very large corpus revealed the full extent of collocational patterning exhibited by these verbs, which for most linguists is the primary reason for engaging in corpus-based investigation. 1