Thursday, April 9, 2009

Task 5 (Concordance)



Hello all, I'm back with this posting on concordance. Frankly speaking, this is my first time I heard about this. For this time, I think it is hard for me to pronounce the word. It make my twisted to pronounce it.hehehehe.. But now, I manage to pronounce the word in a right way. From my understanding, concordance is a list of words in a piece of text or a collection of texts (usually referred to as a corpus). Corpus is collection of written words.

So now, the question is what is concordance used for?
1) Study of texts in linguists

  • comparing different usages of the same word
  • analyzing keywords
  • analyzing word frequencies
  • creating indexes and word lists
  • count word frequencies
  • find phrases and idioms
  • publish to the web
2) In other fields such as content analysis in media studies, history and etc.

There are softwares which called concordancer(in general). Below is the one of the example of the software's interface.

Here I also provide links of article that I've read about concordance.
http://www.lextutor.ca/cv/Hands_on.html
http://www.nuis.ac.jp/~hadley/publication/jlearner/jlearner.htm

From the two articles I would like to make summary on that. I found out that when language learners use concordancer, they can discover rules of usage and grammar for themselves. They learn that language is complex and that rules are seldom true. Despite of learning the language is complex, they also learn to rely on their own judgment rather than the teacher. One more thing, concordancing is also benefit to the learners in training them to pay attention to the patterns of usage in their everyday reading.

That' all for this posting.

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