
Full text loading...
The study of complex grammatical patterns tends to be neglected by corpus linguists, the main reason being that such phenomena are much more difficult to extract from a corpus than simple words or tags. I demonstrate in this article that, although the desirable parsed corpora and appropriate software are not always available, the retrieval of syntactic structures can be automated to a certain extent. A number of corpus-based grammatical analyses, as well as a pilot study of causative structures with make, illustrate the various alternative strategies that can be used to this effect.