ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contribution corpus research that has made both to understanding of the nature of the lexicon and to the knowledge of the behaviour of words and other kinds of lexical, which together comprise the lexicon. It is important to note at the outset that corpus research has not only led to more detailed descriptions of the meaning and behaviour of words; it has also suggested that one needs to consider units beyond the word in describing the lexicon. The chapter also considers quantitative and qualitative corpus-informed reappraisals of the nature and status of lexis and their implications for ELT, focusing on notions such as collocation, lexical chunks and semantic preference. The different aspects of work knowledge which have emerged from corpus research such as semantic prosody, semantic preference and semantic structure. The corpus linguistics has presented a different picture of the lexicon which is possible to identify a number of lexical units beyond the word.
