Making Sense of Corpus Data

This paper demonstrates the essential role of corpus data in the development of a theory that explains and predicts word behavior. We make this point through a case study of verbs of sound, drawing our evidence primarily from the British National Corpus. We begin by considering pretheoretic notions of the verbs of sound as presented in corpus-based dictionaries and then contrast them with the predictions made by a theory of syntax, as represented by Chomsky's Government-Binding framework. We identify and classify the transitive uses of sixteen representative verbs of sound found in the corpus data. Finally, we consider what a linguistic account with both syntactic and lexical semantic components has to offer as an explanation of observed differences in the behavior of the sample verbs.