Since a lexis from a systemic-functional perspective is a way of calling, it can be realised by multiple grammatical words such as "The White House", "New York City" or "heart attack".
After millions of samples of spoken and written language have been stored in a database, these KWICs can be sorted and analyzed for their co-text, or words which commonly co-occur with them.
Valuable principles with which KWICs can be analyzed include: Once data has been collected, it can be sorted to determine the probability of co-occurrences.
In essence, the lexical corpus seems to be built on the premise that language use is best approached as an assembly process, whereby the brain links together ready-made chunks.
Intuitively this makes sense: it is a natural short-cut to alleviate the burden of having to "re-invent the wheel" every time we speak.
Additionally, using well-known expressions conveys loads of information rapidly, as the listener does not need to break down an utterance into its constituent parts.
In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker shows this process at work with regular and irregular verbs: we collect the former, which provide us with rules we can apply to unknown words (for example, the "‑ed" ending for past tense verbs allows us to decline the neologism "to google" into "googled").
Business is also war: launch an ad campaign, gain a foothold (already a climbing metaphor in military usage) in the market, suffer losses.
The NOA [clarification needed] theory of lexical acquisition argues that the metaphoric sorting filter helps to simplify language storage and avoid overload.
Biber and his team working at the University of Arizona on the Cobuild GSWE noted an unusually high frequency of word bundles that, on their own, lack meaning.
[9] In other words, a sentence such as "a cousin of mine, the one about whom I was talking the other day—the one who lives in Houston, not the one in Dallas—called me up yesterday to tell me the very same story about Mary, who..." is most likely to be found in conversation, not as a newspaper headline.
Not surprisingly, each register favors the use of different words and structures: whereas news headline stories, for example, are grammatically simple, conversational anecdotes are full of lexical repetition.