“the background of the usual and everyday”

“individual texts can be explained only against a background of what is normal and expected in general language use, and this is precisely the comparative information that quantitative corpus data can provide. An understanding of the background of the usual and everyday — what happens millions of times — is necessary in order to understand the unique. (Stubbs 2005: 5, emphasis added)” (The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, p. 304)