Hands Dirty Exercise 2
In this exercise you will interact with at least one concordancer and see something of the range of possible results. You don't need to report the results of your searches, but feel free to post comments and ideas on this page's discussion page.
Here are links to two web-based concordancers:
- http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html
- http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/concordance/WWWConcappE.htm
- Choose one of the two concordancers listed above.
- Enter the word "book" in the "keyword" or "search string" field and choose "Brown" or "Brown Corpus" from the corpus dropdown list. Click on the "Search for concordances" or "Get concordance" button. Examine the results. How many instances were found?
- Choose a different word and search for concordances in two different corpora other then the Brown Corpus. Is there a big difference in the results you get? Why is that?
- Collocations: Some of the other controls on these concordancers' interfaces allow you to display information about collocations. Collocations are groups of two or more words that appear together. Answer the following questions for a word you choose. What is the most common word that appears immediately to the left of your word? How many times does it appear there in the corpus you searched? What is the third most common word that appears two words to the right? How frequent is that collocation?
Back to Unit 2: Concordancers