ABSTRACT
A corpus such as the 100-million-word British National Corpus completed in 1994 is certainly useful for ascertaining habitual language use. If the analyst locates a collocate in a public sphere argument which is in surplus of normal collo-cation for discussion of a topic, then implementing normal collocation would mean deleting the surplus collocate. If one treat a corpus as an inside-outside supplement to a public sphere argument, then it follows that they do not see a border to the argument. A public sphere argument may appear cohesive and coherent because of relevant information which has been excluded. The chapter explores the impact of showing the instability of cohesion in a public sphere argument – if the argument cannot hang together its credibility reduces. It shows how problems in the cohesion between 'power' and 'empower' in Little's argument can be detected by exploration of UK Web as Corpus (UKWaC).
