The main aim of this paper is to show that the notion of the ’self-serving bias’, well established in social psychological research, may have an impact on the way in which speakers verbalise certain experiences. I hypothesise that this perceptual bias will interact with other factors; specifically, gender stereotypes (as defined by psychologists and linguists) and modesty (as defined in linguistic pragmatics). I present corpus evidence for the relevance of the self-serving bias and the complex interplay with gender stereotypes and modesty, based on variation between three different causative constructions (CAUSE, X MAKE Y happen, and X BRING about Y) as well as the use of the adverbs cleverly and stupidly. In both cases, my analysis focuses on the cooccurrence with personal pronoun subjects — specifically, differences in terms of person (first vs third) and gender (masculine vs feminine). The most general conclusion I draw is that cognitive (socio-)linguists may be able to formulate interesting new research questions based on concepts drawn from (social) psychology but that constructs developed within linguistics remain highly relevant as well.

Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of the particular approach to corpus linguistics adopted in this book: namely, corpus linguistics as a method (as opposed to corpus linguistics as a theory) (McEnery & Hardy, 2012; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001). The specific corpus linguistic analytical methods used, such as collocation and keyness analysis, and the statistical tests and cut-offs associated with each analysis type are detailed. Using data from the MI 1984–2014 Corpus (specifically the data collected during a pilot study and an illness-specific sample of the data), each analytical method used is exemplified. The utility of each analysis type for analysing ideology in texts is also discussed.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth discussion of Sinclair’s conceptualization of lexis and meaning and its major concepts. It starts from the model of a unit of meaning and explains how it is capable of incorporating both syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of meaning by including optional variable components of collocation, colligation and semantic preference. The chapter continues by offering a theoretical solution of removing the borderline between single- and multi-word units. Further it points out the difference between Firth’s and Sinclair’s conceptions of collocation and defines the relationships between the idiom principle, co-selection, syntagmatic association, core meaning, delexicalization and meaning-shift. A large part of the chapter is devoted to examining the controversy around the concept of semantic prosody. The chapter concludes by discussing Sinclair’s theory of meaning and his idea of the ultimate dictionary. The conceptualization presented in the chapter forms the theoretical backbone of the book.