In this paper we will present a corpus-based cognitive-semantic analysis of five verbs that express 'begin ' in English and Russian, i.e. begin, start, načat', načat'sja and stat'. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of data extracted from the ICE-GB and the Uppsala Corpus we conclude that the prototype for each verb and set of verbs in each language revolves around a different set of characteristics altogether: the difference between begin and start is lexical in nature, that between načat ' and stat ' can be described as aspectual, whereas the differences between načat ' and načat'sja should be termed argument structural. Dissimilarities like these that are of an entirely different order can only be picked up if a methodology is used that adequately captures the multivariate nature of the phenomenon; the Behavioral Profiling approach we have developed and applied here does exactly that.

This chapter has three objectives. First, it argues in favor of more rigorous definitions of the term phraseologism on the basis of six dimensions and exemplifies them for several different kinds of phraseologisms. Second, it reviews the ways in which phraseologisms as defined here have figured in three different linguistic approaches, generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Finally, it discusses a few shortcomings in the identification of phraseologisms and points to relevant work to overcome these shortcomings. Key words

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Abstract. In this paper, we address the problem of selecting the ‘optimal ’ variable subset in a logistic regression model for a medium-sized data set. As a case study, we take the British English dative alternation, where speakers and writers can choose between two (equally grammatical) syntactic constructions to express the same meaning. With the help of 29 explanatory variables taken from the literature, we build two types of models: (1) with the verb sense included as a random effect (verb senses often have a bias towards one of the two variants), and (2) without a random effect. For each type, we build three different models by including all variables and keeping the significant ones, by sequentially adding the most predictive variable (forward regression), and by sequentially removing the least predictive variable (backward regression). Seeing that the six approaches lead to five different models, we advise researchers to be careful to base their conclusions solely on the one ‘optimal ’ model they found. 1.

this paper, we will not only further substantiate our discussion of methodological issues in corpus-based research by comparing and supplementing the results of the ICE-search with those gained from the BNC Sampler, but also amend the experimental part of our first study by a self-paced reading experiment, designed on the basis of the more extended corpus data. We report the results of this additional experiment and relate its findings (i) to more specific questions pertaining to the as-predicative in particular, and (ii) to the theoretical implications and methodological aspects following from this `converging evidence' paradigm

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In Construction Grammar, highly frequent syntactic configurations are assumed to be stored as symbolic units in the mental lexicon alongside words. Considering the example of gerund and infinitival complement constructions in English (She tried rocking the baby vs. She tried to rock the baby), this study combines corpus-linguistic and experimental evidence to investigate the question whether these patterns are also stored as constructions by German foreign language learners of English. In a corpus analysis based on 3,343 instances of the two constructions from the British component of the International Corpus of English, a distinctive collexeme analysis was computed to identify the verbs that distinguish best between the two constructions; these verbs were used as experimental stimuli in a sentence completion experiment and a sentence acceptability rating experiment. Two kinds of short-distance priming effects were investigated in the completion data: we checked how often subjects produced an ing-/to-/'other'-construction after having rated an ing- or to-construction (rating-to-production priming), and how often they produced an ing-/to-/'other'-construction when they had produced and ing- or to-construction in the directly preceding completion (production-to-production priming). Furthermore, we considered the proportion of to-completions before a completion in the questionnaire as a measure of a within-subject accumulative priming effect. We found no rating-to-production 1 priming effects in the expected direction, but a weak effect in the opposite direction; shortdistance production-to-production priming effects from ing to ing and from 'other ' and to to to, and, on the whole at least, a suggestive accumulative production-to-production priming effect for both constructions. In the rating task, we found that subjects rate sentences better when the sentential structure is compatible with the main verb's collexemic distinctiveness. Key words

Historical linguistics has long been one of the linguistic sub-disciplines that benefits most from corpora, and especially during the last 10 to 15 years, many new diachronic resources have been made available. However, the longitudinal nature and the more constrained sampling of diachronic corpora raise several problems historical linguists need to address. One of the most important

Ever since technological development has made it possible to search large corpora in a very short time, corpus linguists have done a lot of interesting work in linguistics in general as well as applied linguistics in particular. Given both a large interest of corpus linguists in lexicographic applications and the fact that words are among the linguistic elements most easily recoverable (in