Acknowledgements

The idea for a volume introducing the concept of a pattern-driven approach in corpus linguistics grew out of our fascination with frequency-based, non a-priori methods of querying large corpora, which in the last two decades have enabled linguistic assessments and discoveries that would not have been possible otherwise. Such methods are typically described as corpus-driven, and it was under that banner that we organised a special session on lexical bundles at the European Society for the Study of English conference in Košice in 2014. The response from the audience and the participants was very encouraging and there was a clear need for a volume dedicated to showcasing new developments in corpus-driven methods and applications. The conference was a springboard for what are now much more refined studies in this book, and additional chapters were contributed by scholars who have also been inspired by the field of corpus-driven linguistics. All chapters have benefitted from cross-reading by other contributors to the volume as well as from expert comments and suggestions by our select panel of external reviewers: Marc Alexander, Viviana Cortes, Philip Durkin, Bethany Gray, Andreas H. Jucker, Maria Kuteeva, Magdalena Leitner, Caroline Tagg, Richard J. Whitt and Christopher Williams. We would like to thank everybody for raising the bar in a constructive, friendly and timely fashion and especially our authors for patiently going through revisions.

During the course of the editorial process we realized that the contributions have something in common besides using corpus-driven methods in novel ways and with new materials. They all engage with the methodology by departing from a strict definition of corpus-driven, theory-free research; instead, while relying on frequency-driven data-mining, they introduce categorisations, models and thresholds that help the researcher identify emerging patterns of language use that shed new light on the linguistic question of interest to them. This is, essentially, a pattern-driven approach to the study of language. We would like to thank Ute Römer, the Series Editor, who pointed us towards this realisation and accepted the title for publication, as well as Kees Vaes and his team for seeing the project through production.

The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the institutions where they were based during the course of this book's editorial process: Joanna Kopaczyk is indebted to Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and the University of Edinburgh, and Jukka Tyrkkö would like to thank the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies and the Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR), both at the University of Tampere.