Language Usage Patterns

Language usage patterns are indicators of discourses and ways of thinking. This hypothesis from discourse and cultural linguistic studies can be tested using methods from modern corpus linguistics. As phenomena on the linguistic surface, language usage patterns can be captured as recurrent lexical units through machine methods of quantitative text analysis. Working with extensive text corpora also provides the opportunity to inductively discover corpus-driven language usage patterns in the data and, based on this, derive hypotheses about the significance of these language usage patterns. The book develops a method of corpus linguistic discourse analysis that enables empirical work in this research field. A series of detailed analyses based on a corpus of nearly 45,000 articles from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from 1995 to 2005 is presented.