Inferring Meaning: Text, Technology and Questions of Induction

Corpus linguists, including lexicographers, use methods which are often called 'inductive'. That is, they study large corpora or large data sets (such as wordfrequency lists) derived from these corpora, in order to identify patterns in the data. There is detailed discussion of a few statistical techniques (e.g. for identifying significant collocations), but little general discussion of the combination of automatic and intuitive methods which are used to make significant generalizations. It might be thought that, if linguists draw generalizations from large data sets, then they would generally agree about the resulting analyses, and certainly corpus work often reaches a remarkably large consensus across different studies. Findings from one corpus are regularly corroborated by studies of other independent corpora, and partly automated or computer-assisted analysis has led to major progress in the study of semantic and pragmatic data.