cooccurrer

A cooccurrer is a term used in corpus linguistics to denote an item that occurs in conjunction with another item within a defined textual context. The cooccurrer is identified relative to a target item and forms part of a co-occurrence relationship analyzed in linguistic data. In practice, researchers treat cooccurrers as the words, phrases, or other linguistic units that appear near the target within a specified window or structural boundary.

Cooccurrers are identified by extracting items from a corpus that appear within a chosen context around the target, such as a fixed number of words to the left and right or within a syntactic unit. Statistical measures like mutual information, log-likelihood, chi-squared, or other association metrics are used to assess the strength of the relationship between the target and its cooccurrers. The concept is closely related to collocation, but the term cooccurrer emphasizes the role of the item as part of a co-occurrence event rather than a fixed lexical pairing.

The use of the term is not universally standardized. Some authors prefer phrases such as “co-occurring word” or “co-occurring item,” especially when discussing various parts of speech or multiword expressions. The idea of a cooccurrer is method-dependent; a word may be a cooccurrer in one analysis and not in another, depending on window size, part-of-speech restrictions, and statistical criteria.

Applications of identifying cooccurrers include lexicography, language modeling, semantic network mapping, and stylistic analysis. Limitations include sensitivity to corpus size and genre, polysemy, and the influence of sampling or annotation choices on which items are counted as cooccurrers.

See also: collocation, co-occurrence, association measures, n-gram, linguistic context.