There is now plenty of evidence that the learning of multiword units can occur across the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development, although the largely unresearched strand with regard to multiword units is fluency development. There are now many useful well-researched lists of multiword units of various kinds. Multiword units tend to be acquired late and are one of the signs of high proficiency in a language. This chapter looks at various ways of classifying multiword units according to their form, meaning, and storage. It has many practical suggestions for supporting the learning of multiword units. These include learning through input, learning through output, consciousness raising, using flash cards, using mnemonic tricks such as alliteration and considering their origins, looking for patterns, using concordances, and fluency development.

This is a ‘quantitative methods’ chapter. It describes the basic quantitative concepts in corpus linguistics. These are: frequency and normalised frequency; range and dispersion; the concept of keyness; collocation; and lexical bundles. In each case research using these ideas is discussed and issues around the different available measures are presented. The chapter then introduces multidimensional analysis and how quantitative studies might be enhanced by semantic and other annotation. The emphasis in the chapter is on how the various measures are used and the impact they have on the applications of corpus research.

Chapter 7 describes the ways in which general extenders, as linguistic variables, align with social variables and become social markers in different communities. Among the variables investigated are age, gender, social class and regional variety. Most examples are from English, especially British English, together with the results from a sociolinguistic study of Montreal French. The different uses of general extenders in the academic and business registers are also described. The highest frequency forms in international varieties of English are reported, with lists of the most common expressions recorded in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.Differences between typical forms associated with southern versus northern England are noted, as well as aspects of Irish and Scottish English. The different methods of data collection employed in the past are reviewed, noting their potential effects on the nature of the data elicited, and advocating for an attempt at consensus on appropriate methodology going forward.

This chapter undertakes a corpus linguistic exploration of the royal correspondence material, following the scribal/holograph division of the previous chapter. Using keyword analysis and lexical bundles, the analysis identifies features that firstly, differentiate royal correspondence from its non-royal counterpart; and secondly, differentiate scribal and holograph royal letters. The evidence correlates with the material analysis in Chapter 2, with formulaicity and consistency key elements of scribal letters which may have indexed a more overt and institutionalised royal power. Holograph letters, on the other hand, show a more variable and idiosyncratic make-up, providing a more personal frame to the epistolary interaction with a letter's recipient.

This chapter conducts a material and linguistic analysis of royal Tudor proclamations, considering how the properties of the genre inform the performance of power in a text designed to be both spoken and seen. The analysis considers material features, such as layout, oversize initials and typeface, alongside key linguistic properties, including lexical bundles and nominal and pronominal references to monarch and subject. The findings are compared against the those for royal correspondence. The chapter proposes that proclamations underwent a process of epistolarization in the Tudor period, becoming more interactive and directly representative of the monarch's prerogative.