Exploring phraseological variations by concgramming

The significance of studying the co-selection of words has long been recognized. More traditional corpus linguistic approaches or tools help to find co-selections in the form of contiguous words (i.e. n-gram, or lexical bundles and clusters) or non-contiguous patterns. However, phraseologies in the form of non-contiguous co-occurrence with positional variations are rarely examined. Here it is argued that they are worth examining and have significance for better understanding language use and meaning. One reason for the rare discussion of these phraseologies is that they are not easily discovered with more traditional approaches and tools. This paper describes the realisation of different patterns of phraseological variations, exemplified with five concgrams (i.e. co-occurrence of words) extracted from two profession-specific corpora. With the use of an innovative corpus linguistic software, ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves, 2009), the frequencies and patterns of all of the possible phraseological variations (constituency and positional variations) of the concgrams are analysed. The illustration and analysis have implications on the application values of studying phraseological variations using concgramming.