WORDSKEW

The purpose of creating WordSkew is to investigate the ways in which language is sensitive to the structure of texts and to discourse in general. There are, of course, many facets to such a wide-ranging statement of interest. One constraining aspect of the current approach lies in looking at frequency and applying corpus techniques, while at the same time taking account of position and distribution in a text, with the aim of moving towards a usage-based discourse grammar. We have ways of talking about discourse at different levels. One is the order inherent in constructions and so if we have no matter then it is either likely to occur as an adverbial or as part of a larger construction with a WH-element and a clause or two. How are these uses distributed in texts? Is no matter more likely to occur at the beginning or end of sentences (or utterances)? What is the distribution of the longer no matter construction in newspaper articles?... Since the purpose of WordSkew is to look at..