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Analyzing Co-occurrence Data

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A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide an overview of quantitative approaches to co-occurrence data. We begin with a brief terminological overview of different types of co-occurrence that are prominent in corpus-linguistic studies and then discuss the computation of some widely-used measures of association used to quantify co-occurrence. We present two representative case studies, one exploring lexical collocation and learner proficiency, the other creative uses of verbs with argument structure constructions. In addition, we highlight how most widely-used measures actually all fall out from viewing corpus-linguistic association as an instance of regression modeling and discuss newer developments and potential improvements of association measure research such as utilizing directional measures of association, not uncritically conflating frequency and association-strength information in association measures, type frequencies, and entropies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We are ignoring the lexico-textual co-occurrence sense of colligation here.

  2. 2.

    While AMs often agree fairly well in their assessment of the degree of attraction between two elements (or at least their overall ranking), their computation can lead to them having different ‘preferences’. For instance, pointwise MI is known to return low-frequency but perfectly predictive collocations (e.g. fixed expressions) whereas measures that are ultimately based on significance tests (such as G 2 or t) often rank more frequent items higher; see Evert (2009) for more discussion.

  3. 3.

    The Kullback-Leibler divergence is also already mentioned in Pecina (2010).

  4. 4.

    See Michelbacher et al. (2007, 2011) and Gries (2013a) for further explorations of uni-directional/asymmetric measures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Stefan Th. Gries & Philip Durrant

  2. Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Stefan Th. Gries & Philip Durrant

Authors
  1. Stefan Th. Gries
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  2. Philip Durrant
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Correspondence to Stefan Th. Gries .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. FNRS Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Language and Communication Institute, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Magali Paquot

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Stefan Th. Gries

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Gries, S.T., Durrant, P. (2020). Analyzing Co-occurrence Data. In: Paquot, M., Gries, S.T. (eds) A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46216-1_7

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