8: Grammar

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The fact that corpora are most easily accessed via words (or word forms) is also reflected in many corpus studies focusing on various aspects of grammatical structure. Many such studies either take (sets of) words as a starting point for studying various aspects of grammatical structure, or they take easily identifiable aspects of grammatical structure as a starting point for studying the distribution of words. However, as the case studies of the English possessive constructions in Chapters 5 and 6 showed, grammatical structures can be (and are) also studied in their own right, for example with respect to semantic, information-structural and other restrictions they place on particular slots or sequences of slots, or with their distribution across texts, language varieties, demographic groups or varieties.