Pattern Grammar

Abstract

Pattern grammar is based on the corpus investigation of individual words, especially adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It exploits the fact that each word is regularly complemented by specific phrase or clause types and not with others. Phrase types include noun phrases and prepositional phrases. Clause types include that‐clauses and to‐infinitive clauses. Pattern grammar has been used to give grammar information in learners' dictionaries and to produce reference books that list the patterns of English and the words that occur with them. The words that share a pattern tend also to share aspects of meaning. This observation has been used in language teaching and also in discourse analysis. Pattern grammar arises from the approach to language description associated with Sinclair and units of meaning. It has also been aligned with construction grammar from the cognitive linguistics tradition.