Automatic retrieval of syntactic structures: The quest for the Holy Grail

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.