Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus

Abstract: The notion of ‘textual colligation’ predicts that certain lexical items have a tendency to occur at particular points in a text, i.e. the beginning or end of texts, paragraphs or sentences. This paper describes new corpus-based methods developed to identify the profile of words, clusters (n-grams) and concgrams (non-contiguous patterns in variant order) in terms of their most common textual locations. Groups of co-occurring text-initial items are then analyzed in terms of their discourse function in relation to theories of newspaper structure. This analysis illustrates how methods from corpus linguistics, when targeted to specific textual positions, can complement text-linguistic analyses.

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus ; volume:8 ; number:1 ; year:2012 ; pages:73-101 ; Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory ; 8, Heft 1 (2012), 73-101

Contributors, Places and Time

• Creator: O'donnell,, Matthew Brook ; Scott,, Mike ; Mahlberg,, Michaela ; Hoey,, Michael

Further information

• DOI: 10.1515/cllt-2012-0004
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2410251602158.127797994050
• Rights: Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 15.08.2025, 7:33 AM CEST