Open Access

This paper presents ongoing research which is embedded in an empirical-linguistic research program, set out to devise viable research strategies for developing an explanatory theory of grammar as a psychological and social phenomenon. As this phenomenon cannot be studied directly, the program attempts to approach it indirectly through its correlates in language corpora, which is justified by referring to the core tenets of Emergent Grammar. The guiding principle for identifying such corpus correlates of grammatical regularities is to imitate the psychological processes underlying the emergent nature of these regularities. While previous work in this program focused on syntagmatic structures, the current paper goes one step further by investigating schematic structures that involve paradigmatic variation. It introduces and explores a general strategy by which corpus correlates of such structures may be uncovered, and it further outlines how these correlates may be used to study the nature of the psychologically real schematic structures.

Empirical synchronic language studies generally seek to investigate language phenomena for one point in time, even though this point in time is often not stated explicitly. Until today, surprisingly little research has addressed the implications of this time-dependency of synchronic research on the composition and analysis of data that are suitable for conducting such studies. Existing solutions and practices tend to be too general to meet the needs of all kinds of research questions. In this theoretical paper that is targeted at both corpus creators and corpus users, we propose to take a decidedly synchronic perspective on the relevant language data. Such a perspective may be realised either in terms of sampling criteria or in terms of analytical methods applied to the data. As a general approach for both realisations, we introduce and explore the FReD strategy (Frequency Relevance Decay) which models the relevance of language events from a synchronic perspective. This general strategy represents a whole family of synchronic perspectives that may be customised to meet the requirements imposed by the specific research questions and language domain under investigation.

Taking a usage-based perspective, lexical-semantic relations and other aspects of lexical meaning are characterised as emerging from language use. At the same time, they shape language use and therefore become manifest in corpus data. This paper discusses how this mutual influence can be taken into account in the study of these relations. An empirically driven methodology is proposed that is, as an initial step, based on self-organising clustering of comprehensive collocation profiles. Several examples demonstrate how this methodology may guide linguists in explicating implicit knowledge of complex semantic structures. Although these example analyses are conducted for written German, the overall methodology is language-independent.