Handlingsreguleringer i danske lægebøger

In this article we present a corpus linguistic project called Syntaktisk Stilistik ‘Syntactic Stylistics’. The goal of the project is to combine pragmatics and syntax in a stylistic description of a text. Our corpus consists of 73 texts written by doctors and other health care personnel for layman. The texts are gathered from both written books and from the Internet. From the outset, the methodology is primarily quantitative, that is in the text we count the occurrences of e.g. different constituents, their material, their frequency, and their combination with other constituents. Many of our findings show a pattern that we try to explain through qualitative studies of e.g. word frequency and language change.