usagesuch

Usagesuch is a neologism used in corpus linguistics to describe a search paradigm that prioritizes usage evidence—how a word or phrase is actually used in context—over simple lemma or form lookups. The term blends the English word usage with a German element meaning “search,” reflecting a focus on finding real-world occurrences rather than cataloging abstract entries. In practice, a usagesuch query retrieves concordance lines and contextual data that illustrate syntactic structures, collocations, semantic fields, and pragmatic aspects of usage.

What distinguishes usagesuch from traditional searches is its emphasis on contextualized evidence. Queries often combine filters for part of speech, syntactic frames, semantic domains, register, and genre, sometimes with proximity and distance constraints. The results typically include multiple authentic examples, enabling analysts to observe patterns such as how a verb governs its arguments, how collocations influence meaning, or how a term behaves across different stylistic contexts.

Origins and scope: as digital corpora and advanced search interfaces became common, practitioners began describing methods that extract and compare usage patterns rather than merely listing word forms. Usagesuch thus serves as a conceptual tool for examining language in use, with relevance to lexicography, language pedagogy, and natural language processing.

Applications and limitations: it supports dictionary entries with authentic citations, helps learners see real-world usage, and informs model training on usage patterns. Limitations include dependence on corpus quality and representativeness, potential bias toward accessible domains, and the need for careful annotation to ensure consistent interpretation.

See also: corpus linguistics, concordance, collocation, lexical retrieval.