Current Issues in Phraseology

In this stimulating collection of papers, leading researchers from Europe and North America demonstrate the theoretical and methodological importance of corpus studies of phraseology and show how data-intensive case studies provide new perspectives on language use. One of the main theoretical findings of recent linguistics is that phraseology is central to language organization. The authors show how software and statistical techniques can reveal phraseological patterns in different text types – literary, academic and commercial – and also typical paths of language change across the last 200 years. These patterns are revealed only when computational methods are applied to corpora consisting of hundreds of millions of running words, collected from thousands of authentic texts. A major feature of the book is its critical comparison and evaluation of different quantitative and statistical tools, which readers can use for their own empirical work. Originally published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Vol. 18:1 (2013).