Application of concordance.

Hai…..meet me again in my forth posting:)

It heve been a holiday last week since we dont have clas an tutorial and there is also no posting that we have to do. But for this week we were ask by Pn.Zaini that lecture us in this week class to do more research on the applycation of concordance. Concordance is really a new thing for me  and I dont even know what it is before until datin explain it to all of us in clas. I think it was such a great tool for us to use as a language student. Enought of that, in this forth posting first of all me and my partner will do a summry on the article of “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordance to Investigate Language Development” in the OTL book page.

Beyond Concordance Lines:Using Concordance in Investigate  Language Develpoment.                                                                                                                                                                                        By Arshad Abd. Samad

Language corpus has commonly used as the basic of dictionary and teaching material. The used of it have been enhance by the easy avaibility of concordance software. The concordance were used to discover how words and grammatical construction are used. Concordance have change student thinking about linguistic and have change student thinking about linguistic and have change into an interesting subject. The Emas corpus is one of  the corpus that consist of close to half a million words. This corpus contain written data in the form of three diffrent essay written by about 800 students. In investigating of language development various method can be use. In the Emas corpus a basic assumption have been made that state the development pattern can be implied by comparing the laguage used of the three diffrent age group. The language productivity and the vocabulary used by the student also heve been examined. Language productivity also have been examined by analyzing the sentence that heve been used by the student and the number of words in their essays. In the Emas corpus they also have been analyzing by using specialized software such as RANGE, a vocabulary analysis program which gives an indication of the kind of vocabulary used. The used of concordance clearly have indicate some forms of development in term of language productivity.

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Application of concordance.

We have have come to think of the computer as the powerfull tool for language learning in its ability to access and deliver multimedia material with the user in the full control.Yet valuable learning oppurtunities remain using technology that predates these multimedia capabilities. Computer performe simple, tedious task that fast and accurately , such as spell cheking a paper, counting words, finding a particular words, the task that tire the human not the computer. One of the tool that can help us in using computer to do such task is cocordance. A concordance’s function is basically to bring together, in other words, to ‘concord’ passages of text which show the use of a word. It’s a type of index arrangement, working in a similar way to the verbal index found at the back of textbooks, in other words, it searches for instances of a word or phrase and comes up with each case of it. Whereas an index in the back of a book will show words in alphabetical order but only refer to them, the concordance will show each instance of each word together in the context from which it came. The term ‘concordance’ is usually applied to literary and linguistic studies, but it is an extremely useful tool which enables students to access a piece of text non-sequentially or to study the ways in which it uses language. Concordances are not only used for literary purposes, but also as cross-reference systems for computer programmers, which enable teams of programmers working together to keep track of all references to, for example, a variable name, across all the files which make up a project.  A concordance is particularly useful for studying a piece of literature when thinking in terms of a particular word, phrase or theme. It will show exactly how often a word occurs, or even if it does not occur and so can be extremely helpful in building up some idea of how different themes recur within a poem and how they relate to the rest of the poem. So if a question is asked about a certain theme or the use of certain words in a poem and what their place is within the poem, it is easy to see how often they come up by looking at the concordance. This is particularly easy when it comes to computer concordances, all you have to do is click on the relevant letter of the alphabet, a list of words will come up and it is easy to scroll down until you find the right one. From there, you can find out all occurrences of that word in the poem in question.  So a concordance is a bit like a computer; it will find things for you, but it will not do the thinking, you have to do that. What it will do is to get you on the right track when, in this case, it comes to deeper analysis of a piece of text. Most useful are interactive concordances, such as the one here in English. An interactive concordance will also find answers to specific queries and produce lists of all instances of words or phrases, but the advantage is the speed and the fact the concordance will find all words, not necessarily possible in textual concordancing. A concordance application can performed many other function such as using elaborate search criteria, sorting result, varying the leght of the context shown with the search term, making words frequantly list, comparing text and saving list. While concordance is widely used in liguistic study and the study of usage for reference, few laguage teacher have student use it in their classroom. The abscurity of this tool is no measure of it usefulness. Some activities that are as simple as werb search can provide examples of  usage for vocabulary, grammar and even punctuation.

Online Concordance or Concordance in Your Computer?

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.

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Concordance Terms.

Corpus: 

A collection of text, sometimes from a specific source field in the form of a single computer, readable file or database.

Corpora:

Plural of corpus or generally denoting many texts from a variety of source.

Concatenate:

Link together into a chain, as individual text file are concatenated to form a corpus. 

Collocate:

Place side-by-side; a collocation of words shows word appearing frequently near it.

KWIC:

(Key word in context)      

 A common option for displaying search result for text databased. For a concordance, the searh term appear in the centere of each line in colored or bold text, with the surrounding sentence context to the right and the left. The list can also be sorted by words to the right or the left of the search term.

ASCII:

(American Standard Code For Information Interchange)

A common character set supported by all computers, representing 128 English letters, numbers and symbols. Any text editor can open an ASCII text file, and most can save in this format (also called “text only”), but its usually not their default  format. Corpora concatenate texts in ASCII format only.

Wild card:

A character in a search, often a questiom mark or arterisk that present an unknown character.

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Aplication of concordance in literary work and linguistic.

A concordance is particularly useful for studying a piece of literature when thinking in terms of a particular word, phrase or theme. It will show exactly how often a word occurs, or even if it does not occur and so can be extremely helpful in building up some idea of how different themes recur within a poem and how they relate to the rest of the poem. So if a question is asked about a certain theme or the use of certain words in a poem and what their place is within the poem, it is easy to see how often they come up by looking at the concordance. This is particularly easy when it comes to computer concordances, all you have to do is click on the relevant letter of the alphabet, a list of words will come up and it is easy to scroll down until you find the right one. From there, you can find out all occurrences of that word in the poem in question.

Concordances are frequently used as a tool in linguistics that can be used for the study of a text, such as:

• comparing different usages of the same word

• analysing keywords

• analysing word frequencies

• finding and analysing phrases and idioms

• finding translations of subsentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation memories

• creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)

• Online concordance

• • Shakespeare Online Corpus

  • Concordance browsing : This site allows you to search a number of English literary classics, including the Bronte novels, Shakespeare and James Joyce’s Ulyssees, with the help of the concordance program TactWeb. It is easy to use, even for absolute novices in the area.

  • Web concordance of English romantic literature

  • Cobuild Direct Corpus Sampler

  • Penn Treebank Search, IMS Stuttgart

  • Corpus of Middle English, University of Michigan

           Michigan Early Modern English Materials                                                      

•                                               THE WEB CONCORDANCES   

                                 

•  

                                  

P.B Shelly                     S.T Coleridge                     John Keats                       William Blake

Selected Poems             The Ancyent Marinere       The Odes of 1819             Songs of Innocence

                                                                                                                         and Experiance

                        

Gerard Manley Hopkins           Wordsworth and Coleridge

         Poem                                  Lyrical Ballads (1798)

First Edition, 1918