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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
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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

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