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Chapter 5. Constance and variability

Using PoS-grams to find phraseologies in the language of newspapers
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Abstract

This paper describes the use of a corpus-driven methodology, the retrieval of part-of-speech-grams (PoS-grams), which is extremely effective for the discovery of phraseologies that might otherwise remain hidden. The PoS-gram is a string of part-of-speech categories (Stubbs 2007: 91), the tokens of which are strings of words that have been annotated with these PoS tags. A list of PoS-grams retrieved from a sample corpus can be compared with that from a reference corpus. Statistically significant items are further analysed to identify recurrent patterns and potential phraseologies. The utility of PoS-grams will be illustrated by way of analysis of a one million token corpus composed of texts from ten sections of The Guardian, the Sassari Newspaper Article Corpus (SNAC).

Abstract

This paper describes the use of a corpus-driven methodology, the retrieval of part-of-speech-grams (PoS-grams), which is extremely effective for the discovery of phraseologies that might otherwise remain hidden. The PoS-gram is a string of part-of-speech categories (Stubbs 2007: 91), the tokens of which are strings of words that have been annotated with these PoS tags. A list of PoS-grams retrieved from a sample corpus can be compared with that from a reference corpus. Statistically significant items are further analysed to identify recurrent patterns and potential phraseologies. The utility of PoS-grams will be illustrated by way of analysis of a one million token corpus composed of texts from ten sections of The Guardian, the Sassari Newspaper Article Corpus (SNAC).

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Chapter 1. Present applications and future directions in pattern-driven approaches to corpus linguistics 1
  5. Part I. Methodological explorations
  6. Chapter 2. From lexical bundles to surprisal and language models 15
  7. Chapter 3. Fine-tuning lexical bundles 57
  8. Chapter 4. Lexical obsolescence and loss in English: 1700–2000 81
  9. Part II. Patterns in utilitarian texts
  10. Chapter 5. Constance and variability 107
  11. Chapter 6. Between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to textual recurrence 131
  12. Chapter 7. Lexical bundles in Early Modern and Present-day English Acts of Parliament 159
  13. Part III. Patterns in online texts
  14. Chapter 8. Lexical bundles in Wikipedia articles and related texts 189
  15. Chapter 9. Join us for this 213
  16. Chapter 10. I don’t want to and don’t get me wrong 251
  17. Chapter 11. Blogging around the world 277
  18. Index 311
Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics
This chapter is in the book Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.05pin

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Chapter 1. Present applications and future directions in pattern-driven approaches to corpus linguistics 1
  5. Part I. Methodological explorations
  6. Chapter 2. From lexical bundles to surprisal and language models 15
  7. Chapter 3. Fine-tuning lexical bundles 57
  8. Chapter 4. Lexical obsolescence and loss in English: 1700–2000 81
  9. Part II. Patterns in utilitarian texts
  10. Chapter 5. Constance and variability 107
  11. Chapter 6. Between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to textual recurrence 131
  12. Chapter 7. Lexical bundles in Early Modern and Present-day English Acts of Parliament 159
  13. Part III. Patterns in online texts
  14. Chapter 8. Lexical bundles in Wikipedia articles and related texts 189
  15. Chapter 9. Join us for this 213
  16. Chapter 10. I don’t want to and don’t get me wrong 251
  17. Chapter 11. Blogging around the world 277
  18. Index 311
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