Blurb:

What corpus linguistic research has demonstrated is that when language is investigated from the lexical end a whole raft of lexically related phenomena arise which challenge and require attention by theories and descriptions of language (see Stubbs, 1996) for an overview). And it is the systemic functional linguist’s task, not the corpus linguist’s alone, to provide theory-consistent accounts and descriptions of these phenomena. The key concept that unlocks the relationship between systemic description and corpus-linguistic findings is co-occurrence. Furthermore, it brings together a range of phenomena including collocation (lexical co-occurrence), colligation (lexical and grammatical co-occurrence) and in particular, I would argue, all types of phraseological unit. In this chapter, we shall explore the relationship between co-occurrence and systemic choice, drawing on corpus evidence as we proceed.