For our purposes, a ‘concgram’ is all of the permutations of constituency variation and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words. This means that the associated words comprising a particular concgram may be the source of a number of ‘collocational patterns’ (Sinclair 2004:xxvii). In fact, the hunt for what we term ‘concgrams’ has a fairly long history dating back to the 1980s (Sinclair 2005, personal communication) when the Cobuild team at the University of Birmingham led by Professor John Sinclair attempted, with limited success, to devise the means to automatically search for non-contiguous sequences of associated words. (Cheng, Greaves & Warren, 2006, p. 414)