ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the principal ways in which scholars have set about the job of describing the communicative impact of a text, and suggests that evidence of usage drawn from a large text corpus offers a new and powerful tool for the analyst. It can provide information about the meaning that was not previously available, indicate important areas for further investigation, and refine the analyst’s intuitive notions – as well as confirming and supporting the impressions that a person with command of the language can access without effort.
