In this chapter we attempt to separate the communal and the individual levels of language representation and explore how linguistic regularities emerge at each of them. We sample one communal and ten individual corpora of language use from the same ELF environment and examine to what extent syntactic structure, priming and chunking influence linguistic choice in each corpus by looking at the variation between contracted and full forms (it is/it’s). We find clear differences in how these three factors work across the corpora and attempt to interpret them in relation to the properties of individual languages, language change and the role of ELF.

Chapter 4 argues for the benefits of an intra-individual research design and collecting different types of data from the same individuals. It shows that there is a developing interest towards an individual rather than commonalities across individuals in psychology, brain research and linguistics and discusses the differences between the individual and the communal level of language representation drawing on the usage-based perspective and complex systems. It then proposes a corpus of Master’s thesis drafts as a usage corpus, a personal corpus of references cited in the thesis as an exposure corpus and word associations as complementing psycholinguistic data. Given a long history of the word association method which was not always successful, the chapter also provides an extended discussion of its specifics. At the end, the chapter describes the corpus linguistic operationalization of meaning-shift units adopted in this study and data triangulation procedures.