Discourse cohesion in Xenophon’s On Horsemanship through Sketch Engine

We build a Sketch Engine corpus for Xenophon’s classical Greek scientific treatise On Horsemanship. Sketch Engine is a web-based corpus-analysis tool that allows the user to inspect the lexical makeup of a text (cf. keyword lists), explore the surroundings of select items (cf. concordances) and identify fixed expressions in a text (cf. n-grams). We make available our corpus-preparation tool and our corpus configuration file for Sketch Engine. We use the Sketch Engine corpus to detect discontinuous verbal multi-word expressions, specifically support-verb constructions (e.g. to take a decision). We examine how support-verb constructions – through their structural and lexical properties – aid discourse coherence and cohesion throughout Xenophon’s treatise. We furthermore examine how the recurring support-verb constructions in the treatise reflect the scientific register of the text. The article shows how an understudied category of lexico-syntactic device (support-verb constructions) in classical Greek majorly aids discourse cohesion, structurally and contextually speaking. It also shows how an understudied text in the form of a technical treatise (On Horsemanship) majorly furthers insight into scientific literacy of the classical period. Finally, by making available our corpus-preparation tool and code, we hope to further collaboration and adaptation and thus improvement of existing tools and counteract the multiplication of tools.