Aiming Low in Linguistics: Low-level Generalizations in Corpus-based Research

Corpora have played an important role in modern linguistics. I review some of the ways in which corpora have been relied upon in linguistics and how they have become increasingly common as sources of data in linguistic research. I then illustrate how corpora allow linguists to explore low-level patterns of co-occurrence associated with the verb in English. The corpus-based research reported here illustrates just one aspect of a larger empirical turn in recent linguistics which views corpus-based and experimentally based linguistic research as crucial, even foundational, in the future evolution of the field, correcting a severe imbalance in the recent history of linguistics which has favored native speaker intution as the source of linguistic evidence.