Corpus-Based Grammar and the Heineken Effect: Lexico-grammatical Description for Language Learners1

The storage of vast amounts of text on computer, together with sophisticated concordancing software, has begun to have a significant impact on language description and on language pedagogy. The theoretical impetus for this development comes from Firthian linguistics and is in marked contrast to the more psycholinguistic approaches to language description which have been dominant for the last thirty years. In particular, lexical patterning is seen as the key to grammatical description. This article assess the current status of corpus-based lexico-grammar with particular reference to the one substantial descriptive grammar of English to have made use of the new computational techniques, the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (1990).