Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Investigating language variation and change
- Part 1 Collecting empirical data
- Part 2 Analysing empirical data
- Part 2.1 Corpus analysis
- 9 Using ‘small’ corpora to document ongoing grammatical change
- 10 Using tag sequences to retrieve grammatical structures1
- 11 Categorizing syntactic constructions in a corpus*
- Part 2.2 Phonetic and phonological analysis
- Part 2.3 Combinations of multiple types of data
- Part 3 Evaluating empirical data
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
11 - Categorizing syntactic constructions in a corpus*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Investigating language variation and change
- Part 1 Collecting empirical data
- Part 2 Analysing empirical data
- Part 2.1 Corpus analysis
- 9 Using ‘small’ corpora to document ongoing grammatical change
- 10 Using tag sequences to retrieve grammatical structures1
- 11 Categorizing syntactic constructions in a corpus*
- Part 2.2 Phonetic and phonological analysis
- Part 2.3 Combinations of multiple types of data
- Part 3 Evaluating empirical data
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
To arrive at a thorough description of the usage of a grammatical construction in a corpus involves a number of stages. Minimally it will require: (a) retrieval of a set of valid instances of the construction from the corpus; (b) categorization of those instances according to linguistic and/or extra-linguistic features; and (c) quantitative and/or qualitative analysis of the instances and their associated categories. Steps (a), (b) and (c) need not be linear – one may, for instance, wish to revisit the retrieval after looking at the quantitative results – but each step is nevertheless required.
Our objective here is to demonstrate and discuss step (b) – categorization of a target structure. We take as a case study the English passive construction, more specifically the long passive, i.e. passives with an overt agent by-phrase, as in John was arrested by the police (Biber et al. 1999: 154). The kinds of coding we describe generally have to be inserted by hand, although like Sebastian Hoffmann (see Chapter 10, this volume) we recommend using a part-of-speech annotated version of the corpus to facilitate retrieval of the target data.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Research Methods in Language Variation and Change , pp. 212 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
References
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