Concordances

Using a concordancing program, such as Wordsmith Tools Concordancer, enables us to find all the occurrences of a word or phrase in a particular corpus in context.

The examples are displayed as lines of text on the screen, with the search item highlighted in the center. For example, if we search for ‘giggl*’ the program will find things like ‘giggle, giggles, giggling’ etc.

TASK 1: The first concordance has not been sorted at all, but it is still possible to say something about our search item. What can you notice about the occurrences of ‘giggl*’?

 

Feedback: One of the most noticeable things is that ‘giggling’ is the most frequent form. We can also see that there is just one occurrence of the adjective ‘giggly’.

TASK 2: The next concordance has been left-sorted so that we can look at what kinds of things tend to precede the 32 occurrences of ‘giggl*’ in our corpus. What insights into the use of ‘giggl*’ can you get from this set of concordance lines?

 

Feedback: We can easily see that giggle forms part of a noun phrase ‘a (bit of a) giggle’, and it appears to form the second element of two two-part expressions ‘laughing and giggling’ and ‘sniggering and giggling. Although we cannot see the genders of all the speakers, we can see that it is not only women who giggle.

 

TASK 3: Finally, if we re-sort this concordance to the right, we can see different patterns emerge. What does this right sort show you? 

 

Feedback: The occurrences of the phrase ‘giggling and laughing’ shows that ‘giggling’ does not seem to be fixed in either the first or second slot of our two-part expressions (we had ‘laughing and giggling’ in our left-sorted concordance).

 

It is important to remember that we have only looked at a few concordance lines here. Of course it is impossible to make sweeping generalizations about ‘giggl*’ based on this evidence. However, what we have seen has shown us some interesting patterns in this particular spoken corpus.

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