Concordances

This session is concerned with Corpus Linguistics, and one of the most important kinds of tool used on corpus linguistics, the concordance.

The goal of the session is to understand the aims and methods of corpus linguistics, and to be able to characterise, find, and use one or more of the many concordances available on the web.

Tasks:

1. Search for characterisations of ``corpus'', ``corpus linguistics''.
2. What are the main topics which are investigated in corpus linguistics?
3. What are the main methods used in corpus linguistics?
4. What kind of information does a search engine like Google provide about texts in the WWW?
5. Search for definitions of and further information about concordances.
6. What is the history of the concept of concordance?
7. What are concordances used for?
8. What is distributional analysis?
9. Search for concordances on the web:
   • static concordances,
   • dynamic, interactive concordances,
   • free and commercial cocordance software.
10. Search for concordances in Bielefeld. (Hint: search the web for the term "HyprLex".)
11. What is a lemmatiser and what is it used for, and what is its relevance to the other tasks?
12. After class:
    • download a concordance for use outside class,
    • pick a wordfield from an area you are interested in (music, sport, ...)
    • select 10 words,
    • search for these in an appropriate corpus,
    • summarise the kind of information you found.