Abstract
This paper discusses the degree to which some of the most widely-used measures of association in corpus
linguistics are not particularly valid in the sense of actually measuring association rather than some amalgam of a lot of
frequency and a little association. The paper demonstrates these issues on the basis of hypothetical and actual corpus data and
outlines implications of the findings. I then outline how to design an association measure that only measures association and show
that its behavior supports the use of the log odds ratio as a true association-only measure but separately from frequency; in
addition, this paper sets the stage for an analogous review of dispersion measures in corpus linguistics.