A corpus gives us access to a vast amount of contexts
in which people have used a certain word. There are slight differences in how
different corpora present this information to the user. However, you will usually
find things like these:
- Access to concordance lines.
- Lists of co-occurrences.
- Collocations, 'right or left neighbors'. When there
is statistical evidence of some kind that the attraction between two words is
especially strong, we speak of collocations. This information can sometimes
been found in (corpus-based) dictionaries.