Corpora for Theory and Practice

In this paper intuition-based studies of reflexive forms such as myself are contrasted with a corpus-based investigation of actual usage of reflexives. The examination of reflexives in English in several corpora reveals a variety of patterns, which are analysed within a schema-based approach to grammar (Barlow and Kemmer 1994). This approach follows the cognitive/functional tradition of grammatical analysis in viewing all grammatical units as composed of form-meaning pairings. The paper demonstrates that a schema-based approach is well-suited to the task of describing the major and minor patterns of use revealed by corpus analysis. The importance of text analysis in language teaching is highlighted and connections between the schema-based grammatical formalism and data-driven approaches to second language learning (Johns 1991b) are briefly explored.