2 What is collostructional analysis?

Collostructional anlysis is a family of methods measuring associations and dissociations between (usually) words and (synactic) constructions. Its theoretical background is Construction Grammar, a theory of language that assumes that language can be exhaustively described as an inventory of form-meaning pairs. These form-meaning pairs are called constructions and exist at various levels of abstraction. For collostructional analysis, so-called partially filled constructions are particularly relevant, i.e. patterns with a lexically fixed part and a variable slot. Classic examples include idiomatic patterns like [X waiting to happen] or [The X-er the Y-er], but the method can be applied to much more abstract constructions as well (e.g. imperatives, discussed in Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003).

Collostructional analysis comes in three major variants:

• Simple collexeme analysis. This variant checks which slot fillers occur at above-chance level in one open slot of a construction, compared to the frequency of the same slot fillers in all other constructions. It is therefore particularly well-suited for patterns with one open slot, e.g. [X waiting to happen].

• Distinctive collexeme analysis. This variant is used to compare two constructions by assessing which slot fillers occur with above-chance frequency in one construction compared to the other. Note that this variant only takes the frequencies of the slot fillers within the two constructions into account, i.e. the overall corpus frequencies are ignored.

• Covarying collexeme analysis. This variant assesses which slot fillers occur together with above-chance frequency in a construction with two open slots such as [The X-er the Y-er]. Again, only the frequency of the slot fillers within the construction is taken into account, i.e. the overall corpus frequencies are ignored.

In Section @ref{cba}, I will give a brief conceptual overview of the ideas behind collostructional analysis, its potential, and its limitations. The subsequent sections contain hands-on tutorials for each of the three variants of collostructional analysis, including extensions of distinctive collexeme analysis that allow for taking more than two constructions into account.

The subsequent sections discuss the three major variants of collostructional analysis using hands-on examples. The datasets used there can be downloaded from the “data” folder in this tutorial’s Github repository.