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G. It wasn’t an accident at all; … thinks the collapse may not have been an accident. (Adapted from Francis 1991: 146–7) The grammatical functioning of a word or phrase can also be considered from a Hallidayan perspective and whether it occurs in the Theme or Rheme position. Of interest is that different senses of a word have been found to have different colligational Theme/Rheme patterning. For example, Hoey (1996) shows that consequence with the meaning of ‘importance’ (always found in his data in the pattern of … consequence in Rheme position) is primed to avoid Thematised position so as to avoid potential confusion with consequence in the sense of ‘result’, which occurs frequently in Theme, as illustrated below: the CMA was an evangelical organisation of consequence.

Moreover, even when positive data are recorded, a corpus might throw up language which may not be acceptable to prescriptive grammarians being a non-standard form of English, may be incorrect structurally, or as is often the case with the English of advanced learners, sound a bit odd to native speakers (Pawley and Syder 1983). For example, in the BNC the following example for recommend is found, which, according to the grammar warning note in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (p. 1371), the construction recommend you ϩ to-infinitive, would be classed as a mistake.

All perfect candidates for semantic prosody since they habitually appear in the company of clearly unpleasant words, yet it seems clear that a word like alleviate, to take one example, certainly does not come to have an unpleasant meaning because of that company. 3). , a point which grammars fail to point out. Moreover, Louw (1993) has illustrated that the semantic prosody of certain verbs can change, depending on whether they are used transitively or intransitively. For example, where build up is used transitively, with a subject denoting people, the prosody is uniformly good, with build up followed by objects such as organisations, understanding, etc.