Corpus, Concordance, Collocation

John Sinclair charts the emergence of a new view of language and the computer technology associated with it. Developments in computational linguistics over the past ten years are outlined. There is discussion of corpus creation and exemplification of corpus use. The book goes on to spell out the implications of these developments for an understanding of collocation.
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review from GoodReads:
This book demonstrates how a truly empirical approach to language and grammar produces theories that are completely different, almost opposed, to those dominant in Chomskian linguistics.
This is the home of the influential concepts of the idiom principle (language consists largely of pre-packaged chunks with their own meaning, which are varied grammatically to fit the co-text) and the open choice principle (language works as a slot-and-filler system, probably when original or difficult meanings are attempted especially when there is little or no pressure to produce). (…)