This edited collection, selected from papers given at the 2011 ICAME conference themed in honour of Stig Johansson, covers a range of topics within what has come to be known as the lexis–grammar interface. Following an introduction by the editors, the book is arranged in four parts: ‘Sequence and order’, ‘Competing constructions’, ‘Emerging patterns’ and ‘Correlating patterns and meaning’. Altogether there are fourteen good-length papers in the book, making it one of the fatter contributions to the Studies in Corpus Linguistics series.
The three papers in the first section, by Michael Stubbs, Doris Dant and Stephen James Coffey, explore word sequences in English, including binomials such as men and women (Dant) and size adjectives (Coffey). Stubbs's paper sets such studies within Firth's distinction between ‘sequence’ (raw data) and ‘order’ (an abstraction from this) and links this to concepts such as Sinclair's units of meaning. He raises questions about how research methods combine with researcher interpretation to abstract order from sequence, a theme which is followed up by the other papers in the book.
The second part, ‘Competing constructions’, consists of five papers (by Zeltia Blanco-Suárez, Ingo Bachmann, Günter Rohdenburg, David Lorenz and Adam Smith), each reporting a diachronic study of two or more lexis–grammar constructions that are similar in form or meaning but which exhibit differences in collocational profile and whose phraseologies or frequencies can be shown to change over time. Examples include dead and deadly (Blanco-Suárez), cannot help -ing and similar constructions (Rohdenburg), and the status of complex prepositions (Smith). This part illustrates the fluidity of sequence and the consequent complexity of deriving order.
The next part, papers by Antoinette Renouf, Anne-Line Graedler and Stefan Diemer, brings the theme of change up to date by investigating neologisms in English and English loanwords in Norwegian. They illustrate the importance of compiling and studying corpora of contemporary language to continue to track changes in language.
The final part, ‘Correlating patterns and meaning’, consists of two papers, by Benet Vincent and Diane Goossens. Vincent's paper investigates the co-occurrence of modal meaning and the V wh pattern, while Goossen's reverses the concept of changing word meaning by investigating how different terms for similar meaning might be studied in corpora. This raises questions concerning the role of researcher intuition in devising corpus searches.
The interaction of lexis and grammar is a very established concept in corpus linguistics, and this collection is a significant and innovative addition to the tradition. Each paper is an excellent contribution in its own right, and there is considerable variation in topic and in focus. I found Stubbs's paper particularly interesting for its insights into the contribution of corpus linguistics to linguistic theory; Rohdenburg's paper is exemplary in handling the complexities of time, register and lexical profiling in comparing ‘rival’ constructions; Renouf's paper, with its typology of neologisms, is an illustration of the attempt to derive order from raw data; Goossen's paper offers a very interesting discussion of corpus-driven and corpus-based methodologies.
The thematic consistency of the collection, however, means that the sum is more than its constituent parts. It illustrates the competing demands of amassing detail and deriving pattern and taxonomy in language description. It is axiomatic in studies of the lexis–grammar interface that the detailed behaviour of individual words, phrases and constructions are essential components of the language as a whole, and that patterning arises out of complexity. Add to this the fluidity of diachronic change and the skewed frequencies of different registers, and the challenge of finding order in chaos is substantial. Each of the papers in this book is a good example of how detail can be investigated without the amassing of such detail becoming an end in itself.
In short, this book is a very welcome addition to the extensive Studies in Corpus Linguistics family. It would provide a good introduction to the topic of lexis and grammar, being accessibly written and covering a large part of the field, but it goes well beyond introduction and is a substantial and significant addition to this aspect of corpus linguistics.
