Von der sprachlichen Oberfläche zum Muster : Zur qualitativen Interpretation syntagmatischer Profile

This paper discusses a corpus-driven approach to the study of multi-word expressions (MWE) (in our terminology: Usuelle Wortverbindungen UWV). Our approach is based on collocation data and syntagmatic profiles. Several interpretative steps lead from the language surface structure to MWE to more abstract multi-word patterns (MWP). MWP contain fixed components as well as slots, which are filled by elements with similar semantic or pragmatic characteristics. Like simple MWE, MWP can be considered units of the lexicon and patterns of language use with a holistic meaning and function. The formation of patterns, the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the fillers and the restrictions on usage cannot be described by rules or language competence alone, but require bottom-up analysis on the basis of very large corpora.