THE DISTRIBUTION OF IDIOMS IN A GENERAL ENGLISH CORPUS: A VIEW FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTITATIVE CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Abstract

The present paper deals with the quantitative and statistic aspects of idioms in a General English corpus, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), within the frameworks of a cognitive usage-based approach to idioms and Quantitative Corpus Linguistics. It is argued that the frequency of idioms may contribute to their cognitive entrenchment. For this purpose, the frequency of select idioms is considered in five genres of the COCA: spoken, fiction, academic, popular magazines, and news, in terms of quantitative corpus linguistics measures of attraction and reliance. It was found that, based on their occurrence rates, select English idioms may exhibit a higher level of entrenchment compared to the others. In addition, it was observed that the idioms that occur less frequently in the corpus tend to achieve higher reliance scores than their more frequent counterparts.