CORPUS-BASED GRAMMAR AND THE HEINEKEN EFFECT - LEXICOGRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS

The storage of vast amounts of text on computer, together with sophist icated concordancing software, has begun to have a significant impact on language description and on language pedagogy. The theoretical impe tus for this development comes from Firthian linguistics and is in mar ked contrast to the more psycholinguistic approaches to language descr iption which have been dominant for the last thirty years. In particul ar, lexical patterning is seen as the key to grammatical description. This article assess the current status of corpus-based lexico-grammar with particular reference to the one substantial descriptive grammar o f English to have made use of the new computational techniques, the Co llins COBUILD English Grammar (1990).