This book fills a gap in studies of meaning by providing detailed case studies of attested corpus data on the meanings of words and phrases. It places lexis and phraseology at the centre of semantics and pragmatics.
Words and Phrases starts from traditional concepts of lexical semantics, including meaning as use, denotation and connotation, lexical field, sense relations, phraseology and collocation. It also uses innovative corpus data to explore these concepts with an exciting new technology.

The main chapters are detailed case studies of words in collocations, words in texts and words in culture. Concluding chapters discuss the implications of corpus analysis for linguistic theory, especially lexico-grammar and theories of competence and performance.