Concordancers

A concordance programme is a list of the instances of a word (or phrase) in a text or corpus of texts, organised to show the immediate linguistic environment of the word. For example, by searching such a programme for instances of ‘interested’, students could remove the doubt of whether the following preposition is ‘in’ or ‘on’.

Go to the site http://www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

Insert the word you are looking for into the Type in your query box. If you only want to consult British English usage, untick the second box in the list of sub-corpora to be searched (American books, ephemera and radio). Now click on the Show Concs box: you will see 40 lines of text, all with your target language used in context.

Try it with: CAPABLE – can we say ‘capable to do?’
DEPEND – what preposition do we use with it (of?)
RESPONSIBLE – as for ‘depend’
WORTH – how is it used?
HOWEVER – is it only used with the meaning of contrast? (=‘sin embargo’) (hint: look for examples where it is immediately followed by an adjective or adverb


Now do searches with ‘so’ and ‘such’, which are often confused. Can you see any clear patterns?

If you look carefully, you should be able to see these structures repeated:

So + adjective / adverb
Such (a) + noun (or + adjective & noun together) (also ‘such as’ when giving examples)


* See also http://www.edict.com.hk/ , which has a dictionary & concordancer incorporated. In the bottom left-hand corner, you will see Web Concordancer and a box underneath which says Keyword: equal to: Type (e.g.) ‘interested’ into this box, then Go: the examples given will demonstrate clearly that the preposition used with ‘interested’ is ‘in’. Notice that many more examples are shown than on the Cobuild site: in some cases, hundreds of instances are shown.