ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the results of some of the corpus-based research on English, and illustrates some of the ways in which the use of corpora can contribute to linguistic description. The most obvious use of corpora for lexical description is in lexicography. Whereas lexicographical studies have, until recently, typically described the lexicon without statistics, for much of the 20th century there has been a tradition of corpus-based lexical studies with statistical information for pedagogical purposes. In addition to lexicographical research resulting in dictionaries of collocations, some research on language acquisition has focused on the phenomenon of collocation. The leading researcher on collocations in the Brown Corpus, Kjellmer, noted that a characteristic of collocations was that they were combinations which co-occur more often than the frequencies in the corpus. The comprehensive description of verb-form use in the Brown Corpus uses a different taxonomy for its analysis of written American English.
