ABSTRACT
In the past, to study the usage of grammatical constructions in English a researcher not only had to compile a corpus to serve as the basis of the study but had to spend much time extracting by hand the relevant information from it. Otto Jespersen, for instance, spent much of his life collecting and analysing the examples he used to serve as the basis of his multi-volume work A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. The introduction of computer corpora, however, has greatly eased this process. Because a variety of corpora is now available on computer tape or diskette (see Taylor and Leech 1991 and Meyer 1986), researchers no longer have to compile their own corpus; the drudgery of analysing a corpus by hand has been greatly facilitated by the introduction of programs (discussed in Jones 1987, Kaye 1989 and 1990) that can automatically search corpora for a variety of different kinds of grammatical constructions. In short, grammatical studies that in the past took years to complete can now be conducted in a relatively short span of time. In this article I will discuss how I used three computer corpora to study a much-neglected area of English grammar: apposition. After briefly defining apposition, demonstrating that it is a grammatical relation having specific syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, I will describe some of these linguistic characteristics as they occurred in the computer corpora I studied.
