How to Do Things with Corpora: Methodological Issues and Case Studies on Grammar

Along with a renewed interest in the empirical foundations of linguistics, the increasing accessibility of large-scale corpora has sparked a surge of corpus-linguistic work on the grammar of natural languages. Corpus-based methods enhance our knowledge and understanding of individual languages, and they are theoretically significant because they allow us to test complex hypotheses on empirical and reproducible data. Spread over six thematic sections, the fifteen case studies in this book reflect on how methodological challenges and decisions affect the corpus-based analysis of grammatical patterns. They cover a wide variety of phenomena (syntax, registers, learner language, morphology, productivity, multilingualism) under different frameworks, including construction grammar, discourse analysis, and generative grammar. The contributors discuss the respective methodological and theoretical issues, proposing innovative solutions for linguistics in the 21st century.

Torsten Leuschner is Professor of German Linguistics at Ghent University and Visiting Reader at Queen Mary University of London.

Anaïs Vajnovszki is taking a joint PhD between Ghent University and Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle on shell nouns in French and Romanian.

Gauthier Delaby is a Ph.D. student at Ghent University. His research focuses on Construction Grammar and its application to Dutch.

Jóhanna Barðdal is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at Ghent University. She is founding editor of Journal of Linguistics and series editor of Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics.