Abstract:
The availability of large-scale electronic language corpora has led to revolutionary
changes in the landscape of linguistic research. Corpus linguistics has in the past
few decades developed from an alternative methodology of linguistic investigation to
a fully-fledged theoretical approach to linguistic study. Furthermore, having access to
electronic corpora has lead scholars such as Sinclair (2004) to redefine the basic unit
of meaning of language. In the light of corpus evidence, he proposes the existence of a
lexical unit which represents a lexical structure higher than the word, in which meaning
is vested. In this article, the notion of a functional unit of meaning in Northern Sotho
is explored. Two case studies are presented, illustrating not only the methodology of
corpus-driven investigation for a Bantu language, but also the theoretical and practical
implications of recognising the existence of extended units of meaning.
