The many uses of run
Résumé
Multifactorial usage-feature analysis (profile-based approach) has been successfully applied to polysemy research (Gries 2006; Glynn 2009, 2010). This chapter represents a repeat analysis of Gries (2006). The study has three aims: (i) to verify the results of the previous study; (ii) to identify limitations in the applications of the statistical technique employed (hierarchical cluster analysis) in the previous study; and (iii) to demonstrate the need to account for sociolinguistic dimensions in polysemy research. The study is based on a sample of 500 occurrences of the lexeme to run, extracted in even proportions from British English and American English and from online personal journals (blogs) and conversations (American National Corpus and British National Corpus).