Analyzing co-occurrence data

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide an overview of quantitative as well as qualitative 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 in/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.