What can corpus software reveal about language development?

This chapter reviews some major aspects of new paradigm for describing grammar. The first section reviews the types of grammatical patterns typically covered in corpus studies. The chapter then discusses the investigation of numerous contextual factors simultaneously, the development of descriptions of the grammar of speech, and the most commonly discussed problem that arises in this new paradigm - the role of acceptability judgements. It then describes and exemplifies the four types of patterns that are most common in corpus-based grammar analyses. Grammatical choices are associated with vocabulary, grammatical co-text, discourse-level factors, and the context of the situation. Associations between grammar and vocabulary are often called ‘lexico-grammar.' Two other approaches are also used for analysing multiple influences on grammatical choices. One is to consider a functional system within a language and describe factors that influence the grammatical features that are used to realise the system. The other approach is to study the grammar of a variety.