Exercise 1
Concordancer Exercises - Getting Started |
These exercises are designed for you to learn about some
common problems that
What is a Concordancer?
A Concordancer is a
computer program that can search through a lot of text quickly to find all the
examples of a particular word. The program will then list all of the examples
of the word in the middle of the page with the sentence it is in at either side
of the word.
The ELC has got an on-line Concordancer
at the ELC Virtual Language Centre for you to use. It searches through a corpus
of around 12 million words when you ask it to search for a word.
You will do one short activity each week.
Mini-Research Question 1:
What comes after the noun "emphasis" and
what comes after the verb "emphasise"?
First go to ELC’s Virtual Language Centre at http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ and find the "Web Concordancer" in the middle of the page.
Type in the word "emphasis"
in the "keyword" box. Don’t
worry about the first box , which is set at
"equal to" , just now. After you’ve typed in "emphasis"
hit the "Go" icon.
You can find this out easily
by scrolling down.
Don't worry about the first
12 examples it becomes very clear after that!
Now go back to the previous
page.
This is a little bit more
difficult to see. However, if we look at the first four examples we can see
"a lot of team work"; "Cantonese speech"; "communist
sympathies"; "ideology". What are all these? Verbs,
nouns, adverbs….?
Remember to look out for the answers which will be given
with the question next week!