“I entirely understand” is a Blairism

Abstract

While the study of idiolect is a neglected area in corpus linguistics, the present article suggests that it can be fruitful. As a tool for studying an idiolect, the three-million-word Tony Blair Corpus is introduced. The maximiser collocations occurring in this corpus are compared to those in the BNC in order to identify those which are truly typical of the individual. A quantitative analysis involving three measures of collocational strength (normalised frequency, Mutual Information and log-likelihood) provide candidate collocations which strongly diverge in the two corpora. These are then subjected to tests of synonym preference and register specificity, resulting in a small number of collocations which can count as Blairisms.