N-gram Analysis

N-gram analysis is a corpus-linguistic technique that extracts and ranks every contiguous sequence of n words (or characters) in a corpus, exposing the recurrent multi-word units — two-word bigrams, three-word trigrams, and longer 'lexical bundles' — that make up a register or text type. By counting how often each sequence recurs, it reveals the prefabricated, formulaic backbone of language that single-word frequency lists cannot capture.