2 - Data and methodology

Summary

This chapter surveys the different sources of diachronic corpus data that are used in the present work and then moves on to the technical part of this book, namely, an elaboration of the corpus-linguistic methods that are applied. The methodological sections draw on ideas developed in Gries and Hilpert (2008, 2010), Hilpert and Gries (2009), and Hilpert (2011). In these references, a number of standard analytical procedures are adapted for the use in diachronic corpus linguistics, which imposes special restrictions on the handling and interpretation of quantitative data. Beyond applying these ideas to new kinds of data, the present chapter also explains why, on a theoretical level, these methods are particularly suitable for the study of constructional change.

Sources of data

This section offers a short overview of the data sources that are used in this book. While all sources represent mostly written English, they differ with regard to variety, register, and genre. The choice of these sources is partly motivated by necessity, as some research questions require corpora with grammatical or sociolinguistic annotation, corpora that are of sufficient size, or corpora that cover a certain time span. At the same time, the selection also shows how broad a spectrum of resources is available these days for diachronic corpus studies. With access to these resources, many different analytical approaches to constructional change are feasible that would not have been practicable only a few years ago.