Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of to run

The first major part of this paper is a comprehensive cognitively-oriented analysis of the senses and their interrelations of the verb to run along the lines of much recent cognitive work on polysemy. In the second major part, all occurrences of to run from the ICE-GB and the Brown Corpus are coded for a variety of linguistic parameters (so-called ID tags), yielding a complete behavioral profile of this verb. On that basis, the paper then discusses several case studies of how such corpuslinguistic quantitative methods can provide objective empirical evidence suggesting answers to some notoriously difficult problems in cognitive linguistics; these include the issue of prototype identification, the (degree of) sense distinctness, the structure of the hypothesized network as well as possibilities of automatic sense identification.