CONCORDANCER

Prepared by:

Siti Hajar bt Ibrahim 0725600

Nurul Farhana bt Mohd Salim 0729742

Fatin Hanani bt Mat Radzi 0724040

Concordancer is a basic tool for corpus linguist.

Turns the electronic texts into databases which can be

searched.

Offers the possibility of searching for word combinations

within a specified range of words and looking up parts of

words (substrings, in particular affixes, for example).

A more sophisticated program might also provide its

users with lists of collocates or frequency lists.

Corpora that can be searched are text files, websites,

emails, etc (anything that can be converted into electronic

texts).

Examples of concordance program:

TextSTAT

WordCruncher

AntConc

WordSmith

ITS USE IN THE FIELD OF CORPUS

LINGUISTICS / TEACHING AND LEARNING

Students can use a concordancer to find out how to

use a word or phrase

To find out which other words belong with a word

they want to use.

Example:

In academic writing, a paper can describe, claim,

or show, though it doesn't believe or want (*this

paper wants to prove that ...).

Language teachers:

can use the concordancer to find similar patterns so as to

help their students.

can also use it to help produce vocabulary exercises.

Researcher:

can use a concordancer, for example when searching

through a database of hospital accident records, to see

whether fracture is associated with fall, grease, ladder.

ARTICLE 1 : A CONCORDANCE-BASED STUDY OF

METAPHORIC EXPRESSIONS USED BY GENERAL PRACTITIONERS

AND PATIENTS IN CONSULTATION

Purpose: To study metaphoric expressions used by

doctors and patients in general practice.

Design of study: Concordance-based language analysis of

spoken data.

Method: 373 consultations with 40 doctors in a UK

general practice setting were transcribed and scrutinised

for metaphoric expressions, using „concordancing‟

software. Quantitative and qualitative methods were

used in analysis.

RESULTS

Doctors use mechanical metaphors to explain disease and

speak of themselves as „problem-solvers‟ and „controllers

of disease‟.

Patients employ a range of vivid metaphors, but fewer

metaphors of machines and problem/solution. They use

metaphors to describe symptoms and are more likely to

use metaphoric language at the interface of physical and

psychological symptoms (eg. „tension‟, „stress‟).

ARTICLE 2: CORPUS CONCORDANCING

IN TEACHING ACADEMIC DISCOURSE WRITING

TO MEDICAL STUDENTS

Purpose: To teach the skills necessary to describe a research.

Design of study: Concordancing-related corpus analysis and non-

concordancing related corpus analysis.

Method: 15 research articles from prestigious scientific journals in

the field of medicine were analysed by Group A (students doing

analysis using concordancer) and Group B (doing analysis through

“traditional way”).

Genre analysis: lexico-grammatical items, including

interpersonal metadiscourse devices, and rhetorical features

of the text.

Both types of text analysis enabled the students to make

the following generalisations:

1. First person pronouns are used when the writers describe

their own procedural choices in their research.

2. The preferable tense for outlining the objectives of a study

is the past tense.

3. The most frequent verbs introducing the purpose of the

study are “identify”, investigate” and “determine”.

The group of students which used corpus concordancing

software arrived at these generalisations far more quickly

than those students who performed corpus analysis in a

traditional, “manual” way.

RESULTS