Collostructional Analysis

This chapter discusses the concept of collostructional analysis, a family of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods that allow researchers to express the strength of the relationship between word constructions and the grammatical structures they occur in. It provides several case studies and shows how varying collostructional measures can enlighten constructionist analyses of lexical and grammatical constructions. The chapter explains that although adoption of collostructional analysis is a comparatively recent development in Construction Grammar, it has already been applied to a fairly wide range of constructions in the context of research questions ranging from systemic description over language variation and change to language acquisition and processing. It also addresses important methodological issues of collostructional analysis such as the use of inferential statistics, the cognitive mechanisms assumed, as well as the choice of statistical tests.