Text analysis meets corpus linguistics

In recent years, there has been rising interest to using evidence derived from automatic syntactic analysis in large-scale corpus studies. Ideally, of course, corpus linguists would prefer to have access to the wealth of structural and featural information provided by a full parser based on a complex grammar formalism. However, to date such parsers achieve neither the speed nor the robustness needed to process hundreds of millions of words. Beside this practical limitation, there are at least two more fundamental problems with this approach. Firstly, complex grammars tend to produce highly ambiguous output. Without extensive lexical and semantic knowledge, there will often be thousands of different analyses for any given sentence. Secondly, full parser usually embrace a particular theoretical perspective, embodied in the grammar formalism they use. If the researcher’s perspective on syntax is different from that of the parser, he or she will find it difficult, if not outright impossible, to apply the parser’s analyses to the research question.