5 - Exploring Corpora through Quantitative Measures

Summary

This is a ‘quantitative methods’ chapter. It explains the consequences of more advanced developments in quantitative corpus techniques. Two themes are developed. Firstly, some advanced measures improve the range of options available to researchers studying, for example, collocation or keyness. This shows that different measures may give different results. Secondly, some applications of statistical techniques allow the contents of a corpus to be rearranged, leading to novel insights. It is argued that these bottom-up approaches amount to quantitative ‘corpus-driven’ methods. Topics discussed in the chapter are keyness, collostructions, text clustering using lexical bundles and multidimensional analysis, and word clustering using principal component analysis and topic modelling.