摘要：We explore the usage of the cardinal English posture verbs sit, stand, and lie
relying on a number of corpora of English with a view towards establishing
quantitative and qualitative differences for these search items across relatively
small and relatively large corpora. Frequencies of these verbs in various contexts
were compared, as well as the range of correlates found in some selected
constructions. Our results reveal a high degree of consistency between all the
corpora for frequency of occurrence of the posture verbs. However, only the
very large corpus revealed the full extent of collocational patterning exhibited
by these verbs, which for most linguists is the primary reason for engaging in
corpus-based investigation.
