Chapter 5 compares the phraseology of usage to exposure. It shows that more than half of patterns extracted from a student’s usage corpus also occur in her exposure corpus. At the same time the figure drops significantly if these patterns are compared to a different student’s exposure corpus supporting the assumption of representativeness. The chapter then proceeds to compare usage patterns to exposure qualitatively focusing on the processes of variation and change. It finds support for the process of approximation through which a more or less fixed pattern loosens and becomes variable on the semantic or grammatical axis presumably due to frequency effects and the properties of human memory. The chapter also proposes a reverse process, fixing, through which the pattern extends and develops verbatim associations through repeated usage. Both processes are suggested to occur within meaning-shifts units and thus be characteristic of co-selection.

Chapter 4 argues for the benefits of an intra-individual research design and collecting different types of data from the same individuals. It shows that there is a developing interest towards an individual rather than commonalities across individuals in psychology, brain research and linguistics and discusses the differences between the individual and the communal level of language representation drawing on the usage-based perspective and complex systems. It then proposes a corpus of Master’s thesis drafts as a usage corpus, a personal corpus of references cited in the thesis as an exposure corpus and word associations as complementing psycholinguistic data. Given a long history of the word association method which was not always successful, the chapter also provides an extended discussion of its specifics. At the end, the chapter describes the corpus linguistic operationalization of meaning-shift units adopted in this study and data triangulation procedures.