What can a corpus tell us about lexis?

This chapter contains an overview of the wide range of areas where corpus linguistics can offer the researcher insights into lexis. It highlights areas where corpus methods have maintained continuity with the pre-corpus era, such as accelerating the production of word frequency counts and concordances, the quantification of collocational relationships between words and the development of new word meanings. It also discusses how corpus linguistics has expanded the notion of lexis from the pre-corpus era and led to new concepts such as semantic prosody and pattern grammar. The majority of corpus resources referred to in the chapter are accessible online to researchers, and all of the observations about lexis can be replicated by the reader