Linguistic predictions in context

Virtually never are linguistic expressions and features distributed over texts by pure chance – "Language is never, ever, ever, random" (Kilgarriff, 2005). Rather, the occurrence of a certain item (word form) guides expectations about the appearance of other items in its context and thus, makes these other items predictable at a certain probability. For theoretical linguistics, this raises the question where to locate such cooccurrence information: in grammatical principles, in constructions (structural patterns) represented as a whole or with variable slots, in syntax and/or in the lexicon. But cooccurrence patterns are also fascinating beyond pure linguistics, because they reveal pathways of writing and thinking in a language, and are very often characteristic of a given culture. This leads to the central research question for the project: How strong is the relation between regular cooccurrences in large text corpora on the one hand, and psycho-/neurolinguistic measures of collocation and selectional restrictions on the other?
Virtually never are linguistic expressions and features distributed over texts by pure chance – "Language is never, ever, ever, random" (Kilgarriff, 2005). Rather, the occurrence of a certain item (word form) guides expectations about the appearance of other items in its context and thus, makes these other items predictable at a certain probability. For theoretical linguistics, this raises the question where to locate such cooccurrence information: in grammatical principles, in constructions (structural patterns) represented as a whole or with variable slots, in syntax and/or in the lexicon. But cooccurrence patterns are also fascinating beyond pure linguistics, because they reveal pathways of writing and thinking in a language, and are very often characteristic of a given culture. This leads to the central research question for the project: How strong is the relation between regular cooccurrences in large text corpora on the one hand, and psycho-/neurolinguistic measures of collocation and selectional restrictions on the other?