English phraseology and corpora. An introduction to corpus-based and corpus-driven phraseology

The present course book is a summary of lecture notes compiled for undergraduate students of English Philology at Vilnius University for the course on Phraseology. What started as an optional course on the study of phrases was gradually developed into a seminar on research writing in the field of phraseology. The design of the seminar requires that students gain basic knowledge in phraseological research, develop skills in the use of a number of corpus tools, acquire elementary understanding of several statistical tests relevant for the analysis of corpus data and, last but not least, are introduced to the process of research writing. This course book was thus primarily conceived as a manual for students enrolled on the course and interested in carrying out their own phraseology-based research projects for their term papers. Therefore, it introduces the reader to major research strands in contemporary English phraseology, discusses its terminology and methods as well as offers tasks for individual exploration.

Hopefully, the course will provide a reasonable methodological basis and encourage students to take a step further and start developing their own original ideas for BA and MA theses. As such, the present course book should be regarded as an introductory reader rather than the ultimate resource. Throughout the book, the reader will find not only explanations and illustrations but also references for further reading. More generally, the course book may be beneficial to anyone willing to get hands-on expe¬rience in corpus data extraction and analysis and will thus serve as an introduction to corpus-based and corpus-driven analysis of phraseological units.

The body of the course book is arranged in four chapters. Each chapter starts with a brief explanation of relevant terminology and definitions, an overview of the most important methodological issues and/or relevant approaches to the study of phrases in question, and then invites the reader to embark on a journey of phraseological discoveries by doing a set of study tasks.