Use words, not constructions!

Abstract

The aim of collostructional analysis or, more precisely, simple collexeme analysis, is to quantify the statistical association between a construction c and a lexeme l that occurs in a particular slot of the construction. The analysis is based on 2×2 contingency tables that ought to represent a cross-classification of the units of analysis. So far, the units of analysis have been identified either as all constructions in the corpus or all instances of a class C of constructions to which construction c belongs. In practice, it is often not possible or feasible to identify these constructions. Therefore, the sample size is typically approximated by heuristic estimates. The bottom-right cell of the contingency table is most affected by these approximations. I suggest that the units of analysis be defined on the word level, instead, as the class W of word forms that satisfy the restrictions on the collexeme slot of c.