Run through time: a corpus-based study of the polysemous word 'to run'

The purpose of this research was to study the senses of the polysemous word 'to run' as it is said to be the word with most senses on OED (2015) by using TIME Corpus as the tool to draw out the authentic tokens for 'to run'. The data that had been retrieved was matched with the senses from Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED) in order to find the sense that has been found the most in each decade (1920s to 2000s) and overall. Also, the instant collocation (R1) had been collected along the process. In order to find evidence that could relate to the increase in the senses of ‘to run’, the themes, which had derived by analyzing the semantic characteristic of the clauses, were used. The findings of 900 tokens, 100 from each decade, showed that the sense that has been found the most throughout each decade and overall is the sense ‘to direct, to conduct’, while the R1 that was found the most was ‘the.’ As for the theme, ‘politics’ came as number one among all. The findings were not the same as some previous studies as it could probably be affected by the bias of TIME Corpus as the article and the texts were mainly focused on politics and business.