Collostructional Analysis

Collostructional analysis is a family of corpus-based methods, introduced by Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Th. Gries in 2003, that quantify the mutual attraction or repulsion between specific words (lexemes) and the grammatical constructions they occur in. Rooted in construction grammar, it treats a construction — such as the ditransitive "V NP NP" or the "into-causative" — as a meaningful unit and asks which words are statistically drawn to it or kept from it. The core technique, simple collexeme analysis, cross-tabulates how often a lexeme appears in the construction against how often each appears elsewhere, and measures the strength of association, conventionally with a Fisher–Yates exact test. Two extensions handle near-synonymous constructions (distinctive collexeme analysis) and the joint behavior of two slots within one construction (co-varying collexeme analysis), making the method a rigorous quantitative window onto the lexis–grammar interface.