WE NEED TO

a) Keyness

‘We need to’ was the fifty-sixth most significant key three-word cluster in the BEC corpus.

N	Word	bec freq.	bec.lst %	bnc freq.	bnc.lst %	Keyness	P
56	WE NEED TO	148	0.01	102	-	64.5	0.000000

b) Semantic Prosody

Left: No groups identified.

Right: Unsurprisingly, the collocates of ‘we need to’ all refer to future plans, goals or achievements, i.e. what ‘we need to do’ in one way or another. There are no obvious patterns, or positive/negative connotations. Connotations are more to do with work or the ‘what’ of what needs to be done. Below are listed verbs found commonly to follow ‘we need to’:

do, decide, get, know, look at, make sure, save, send, start, talk, think

c) Three-word clusters

6-word:

N	cluster	Freq.
1	that we need to look at	3
2	what we need to do is	3

5-word:

N	cluster	Freq.
1	we need to look at	7
2	what we need to do	6
3	i think we need to	5
4	do we need to do	4
5	that we need to look	4
6	that's why we need to	3
7	we need to do is	3
8	we need to have a	3
9	we need to make sure	3

4-word:

N	cluster	Freq.
2	we need to do	15
3	we need to be	11
4	and we need to	10
5	do we need to	10
6	we need to know	10
7	what we need to	10
8	so we need to	8
9	we need to look	8
10	we need to make	8
11	need to look at	7
12	but we need to	6
13	we need to get	6
14	i think we need	5
15	then we need to	5
16	think we need to	5
17	we need to have	5
18	we need to put	4
19	we need to start	4

d) Macro-generic distribution

e) Colligation

i) we need to + verb:

148 instances - 100% of sample

ii) (what) + we need to + do:

15 instances - 10.13% of sample

f) Associates

No associates identified.