Posting 5: Concordance

Article 1 : Using a Concordance

A Concordance program is a computer program that can help you analyze the language that is used in real situations (example). There are two basic ways you can use a concordance:
concordance programs you have on your own computer. Examples:

• Conc 1.76, for Macs, can be downloaded here. (This is a quite simple program, but is free.)
• ConcApp, for Windows, (also free) can be downloaded here.
• MonoConc 1.5, for Windows. (information)

online concordances. Free demos:
• Collins COBUILD (from England)
• the VLC Web Concordancer (from Hong Kong)
• MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of American Spoken English)
• Webcorp (which searches the web! It's a little slow, but has some useful options.)
• BNC (British National Corpus)
• Spaceless Concordancer (you provide the text)
• Online KWIC Concordancer (Business Letters)

The advantages of using an online concordances are that you can do this online without installing a concordance program on your computer, and that you can search in much larger corpora (the COBUILD corpus contains 56 million words!), so you will find many more examples of what you are looking for (although these demo programs may limit the number of examples that will be returned -- 40 for COBUILD, for example.)
The advantage of using a concordance program on your computer like Conc to search within texts you choose, is that you can choose texts you are already familiar with, so the context is clearer. With the online concordances, of course, you can only search the texts they have included in their corpora .. which will probably be unfamiliar (and possibly unknown) to you.
With COBUILD, you can choose a corpus of "American books, ephemera and radio" .. but you will not know where individual examples come from. With the VLC Web Concordancer you have more flexibility with corpora, but the only US non-web texts available are the Brown corpus of written English, and the Starr report (!). You are able to see the complete context from which the examples come, though. MICASE works similarly to the COBUILD and VLC sites, only you can control for a lot more variables (gender, age, academic discipline, discourse mode, etc. etc.). You can find out the source of each example, but not the original wider context. Under the advanced search option of WEBCORP you can specify particular areas to search. And you can specify the format of the output and sort the results, which can be very useful.
* * LOTS MORE information about concordances * *


AND DON'T FORGET... Another HUGE corpus of authentic English is available at the click of a mouse .. the INTERNET. Any search engine can provide examples of particular words and phrases in actual use, although not so nicely arranged as in a concordance. (Of course, the source of materials on the web also needs to be taken into account.)

CONCORDANCE BASICS
(examples: Finding Gerunds and Infinitives or Conditions)

• 1. OPEN A CONCORDANCE PROGRAM:
These examples use the program "Conc 1.76." (Other programs work similarly.) After you have opened Conc, you will see a diamond with a key in it in the upper right of your desktop.

• 2. OPEN THE TEXT YOU WANT TO SEARCH (YOUR CORPUS):
Under the File menu in the upper left of your window, open Open .. You can open any file that has been saved in a "text" format. (To do this, open a file, choose "save as..", choose "text", and rename it before you save it. Then you will be able to open it from within the concordance program.)
After you open your file, you will notice that it appears in a box at the top of the screen. (If you choose "9 point" under the Font menu, the type will be smaller and more will fit on each line.) You can "Append" other files to your initial one, to create a longer corpus in which to search. The longer your corpus, the better chance you have of finding examples you want.

• 3. TELL THE PROGRAM WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR:
Under the Options menu at the top of your window, choose Include words .... You will get an options box like the one shown below.

• GERUNDS/INFINITIVES:
To practice, we can look for gerunds and infinitives. But we have to tell the concordance program exactly what words we are looking for. To find infinitives, we should ask the program to find all of the to s. In the third box in the options box, below Include words in the following list: type in: to . For infinitives, this one word should be enough.
To look for gerunds, we need to find many different words, but we know that we are looking only for words that end in -ing. In order to look for PARTS of words, we need to enter them in the first box under ... words that match one of these patterns: To look for words that end with -ing, type a period (.) followed by ing. The period is a "wild card", which stands for "any letters in this position."

• CONDITIONS:
Let's think about each clause in a condition separately:
THE IF-CLAUSE: As we know, "if-clauses" or phrases often begin with the following words or phrases:
if - unless - provided that - as long as or without
or otherwise or in that case replacing the entire clause
THE MAIN CLAUSE: In real conditions, the main clause looks just like a "normal" sentence. But we will probably find lots of unreal conditions if we look for the following words:
would - could - might

In the third box in the options box, below Include words in the following list: type in each of these words (for phrases, choose the most distinctive word to search for ( provided, for example).


• 4. TELL THE PROGRAM HOW TO DISPLAY YOUR RESULTS:
Under the Options menu, if you choose Sorting .. you can ask that your examples be sorted according to the words following them ... this can be useful in identifying patterns. (If you don't choose this option, each word will be listed in the order in which it occurs in your text -- which might also be useful.) -- (Other, more sophisticated concordance programs provide more sorting options.)
Again, if you choose "9 point" under the Font menu, the type will be smaller, and more of the context before and after the word will be displayed.

• 5. TELL THE PROGRAM TO BUILD YOUR CONCORDANCE:
Under the Build menu at the top of the window, choose Word concordance and you will see another box of text appear below the first one. The words you have told the program to look for will be bold and lined up in the middle, with the words before and after them on either side. The bold words will be in alphabetical order, and the examples of the same word will be in the order you have chosen (the order they appear in in the text, or in order according to the word following them.) (Therefore, examples of to will be together near the end of the list, but there will probably be -ing- words before and after them.) (Along the left side will be numbers indicating the LINE numbers in the original text -- these, of course, depend on the total makeup of your "corpus", and on the font in which you have displayed it.)
Notice that if you click on one of the examples in the lower window, the text in which it appears is shown in the window above. This way you can look through all of your examples, and also see the complete context that they come from if necessary.
• LOOK AT WHAT YOU'VE FOUND, AND COPY, SAVE, OR PRINT THE EXAMPLES YOU WANT:
• You can open a word-processing window and copy and paste examples from your concordance into a word processing document -- and then select examples that fit your purposes (all examples of to, for example, will not be infinitives.), rearrange or reformat the examples, etc.. Here are two on-line examples, but be sure you can print your work before you spend a lot of time on this: conditions * gerunds/infinitives
• You can save the entire document on a disk. (under the File menu.)
• You can print the concordance (also under the File menu.)



• 6. EXPERIMENT WITH OTHER FEATURES OF THE PROGRAM:
(different patterns, displays, the index, statistics, etc.)

www.iei.uiuc.edu/structure/structure1/conc.html

Article 2: Teaching With Concordances

www.tesol.org/s_tesol/article.
Summary/abstract:

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The framework provided in the article can be easily adapted for a wide range of language teaching points including vocabulary acquisition, differences in synonym use, usage variation in register or genre, preposition choice, semantic prosody, or word connotation (see Tribble & Jones, 1997, for several ideas on how to use concordances in the classroom). As previously stated, teachers can preselect concordance lines to assist lower proficiency levels or to make a language feature more salient.