Mapping Recurrent Lexico-grammatical Patterns in English Through Subtree Fragments

Abstract This paper examines subtree fragments (StF) as a corpus-informed method for identifying recurrent lexico-grammatical structures and compares them to two established approaches: collocational frameworks (Sinclair and Renouf 1988) and pattern grammar (Hunston and Francis 2000). StFs differ from these approaches in two major respects. First, they are grounded in a theoretical linguistic assumption that lexical heads project syntactic structures, incorporating part-of-speech categories, phrase structures, and thematic role assignment. Second, StFs are identified semi-automatically from parsed corpora by exploring patterns of grammatical words and syntactic categories, in contrast to the predominantly manual, concordance-based methods of the other two approaches. The findings suggest that StFs provide a productive interface between theory-driven syntactic analysis and data-driven corpus linguistics, allowing for fine-grained mapping between form, meaning, and use while retaining compatibility with probabilistic and statistical perspectives.