Some Current Quantitative Problems in Corpus Linguistics and a Sketch of Some Solutions

This paper surveys a variety of methodological problems in current quantitative corpus linguistics. Some problems discussed are from corpus linguistics in general, such as the impact that dispersion, type frequencies/entropies, and directionality (should) have on the computation of association measures as well as the impact that neglecting the sampling structure of a corpus can have on a statistical analysis. Others involve more specialized areas in which corpus-linguistic work is currently booming, such as historical linguistics and learner corpus research. For each of the problems, first ideas/pointers as to how these problems can be resolved are provided and exemplified in some detail.