Cover not available
Part of
Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Joanna Kopaczyk and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 82] 2018
► pp. 107–130

Chapter 5
Constance and variability

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

| Università degli Studi di Sassari
| Università degli Studi di Sassari
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).
Keywords: PoS-grams, phraseology, journalism, corpus-driven
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and methods
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Travel PoS-grams
    • 3.2Crime PoS-grams
    • 3.3Obituaries PoS-grams
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 13 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.82.05pin
References
Baron, Alistair, Rayson, Paul, & Archer, Dawn
2009 Word frequency and key word statistics in historical corpus linguistics. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 20(1): 41–67.Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2008 Emotion Talk across Corpora. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monika & Caple, Helen
2012 News Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas
2009 A corpus-driven approach to formulaic language: Multi-word patterns in speech and writing. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(3): 381–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Barbieri, Federica
2007 Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purposes 26(3): 263–286. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Conrad, Susan
2009 Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Conrad, Susan & Cortes, Viviana
2004  If you look at…: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics 25(3): 371–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad Susan, & Finegan, Edward
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Cheng, Winnie, Greaves, Chris, Sinclair, John McH., & Warren, Martin
2009 Uncovering the extent of the phraseological tendency: Towards a systematic analysis of Concgrams. Applied Linguistics 30(2): 236–252. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Winnie, Greaves, Chris & Warren, Martin
2006 From n-gram to skipgram to concgram. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11(4): 411–433 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carter, Ronald & McCarthy, Michael
2006 Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
D’hondt, Eva K. L., Verberne, Suzan, Weber, Niklas, Koster, Kees & Boves, Lou
2012 Using skipgrams and PoS-based feature selection for patent classification. Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal 2: 52–70.Google Scholar
Fletcher, William
2002–2007 kfNgram. Annapolis MD: USNA. [URL]> (10 June 2016).
Francis, Gill
1993 A corpus-driven approach to grammar – principles, methods and examples. In Text and Technology. In Honour of John Sinclair, Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds), 137–156. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Francis, Gill, Hunston, Susan & Manning, Elizabeth
1998 Grammar Patterns, 2: Nouns and Adjectives. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Gray, Bethany & Biber, Douglas
2013 Lexical Frames in Academic Prose and Conversation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(1): 109–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greaves, Chris & Warren, Martin
2010 What can a corpus tell us about multi-word units? In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, Anne O’Keeffe & Michael McCarthy (eds), 212–226. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan
2011 Corpus Approaches to Evaluation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan & Francis, Gill
2000 Pattern Grammar: A Corpus Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 4]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan & Sinclair, John McH.
2000 A local grammar of evaluation. In Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, Susan Hunston & Geoff Thompson (eds), 74–101. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Hyland, Ken
2008 As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes 27: 4–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kopaczyk, Joanna
2013 The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs. Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380–1560. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, Jim R. & White, Peter R. R.
2005 The Language of Evaluation. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morley, Barry & Sift, Patricia
2006 Towards the automatic identification of directive speech acts. In Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English [Linguistic Insights 31], Roberta Facchinetti & Matt Rissanen (eds), 95–112. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Philip, Gill
2008 Reassessing the canon: ‘Fixed’ phrases in general reference corpora. In Phraseology. An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Sylviane Granger & Fanny Meunier (eds), 95–108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reyes, Antonio & Rosso, Paolo
2012 Making objective decisions from subjective data: Detecting irony in customer reviews. Decision Support System 53: 754–760. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spiccia, Carmelo, Augello Agnese & Pilato, Giovanni
2015 Posgram driven word prediction. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Vol. 1 [IC3K 2015], Ana Fred, Jan Dietz, David Aveiro, Kecheng Liu & Joaquim Filipe (eds), 589–596. Lisbon. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, Michael
2007 An example of frequent English phraseology: Distributions, structures and functions. In Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on, Roberta Facchinetti (ed.), 89–105. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, Michael & Barth, Isabel
2003 Using recurrent phrases as text-type discriminators: A quantitative method and some findings. Functions of Language 10(1): 61–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Clarke, Isobelle, Tony McEnery & Gavin Brookes
2021. Multiple Correspondence Analysis, newspaper discourse and subregister. Register Studies 3:1 ► pp. 144 ff. DOI logo
Drury, Brett & Samuel Morais Drury
2022. Lexical Bundle Variation in Business Actors’ Public Communications. In Text, Speech, and Dialogue [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13502], ► pp. 339 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.