Concordance| History & Application of Concordancers| Corpus Linguistics| Urdu/Hindi Notes

Concordance
History of Concordance
All Key concepts and Terms in Concordance
Major Concordancer and their Features
Applications of Concordancer

Concordance refers to the arrangement and presentation of individual words or phrases in their specific context within a text corpus. It involves extracting and displaying instances of a particular word or phrase along with the surrounding words or phrases. Concordance analysis helps in studying word usage, collocations, language patterns, and relationships within a corpus.

History of Concordancer

First Generation
Second Generation
Third Generation
Fourth Generation

First Generation
First-generation concordance were typically held on a mainframe computer and used at a single site, such as the CLOC (Reed 1978) concordancer used at the University of Birmingham. Individual research teams would build their own concordancer and use it on the data they had access to locally. These tools typically did no more than provide a straightforward concordance. Any further analysis was done by separate programs.

Second Generation
Second-generation concordancers were a result of the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s were enabled by the spread of machines of one type in particular across the planet. Unlike the first-generation, they were designed to be installed and used on the analyst’s own machine.
This was important in two ways. Firstly it meant that a lot of effort that had gone into reinventing the wheel could now be directed towards producing better tools. Secondly, it had a democratising effect.. With PC-based concordance, any linguist who was able to switch on and use a PC could use corpora and apply corpus techniques to their own data.

Third Generation
The third generation of concordance software also runs mostly on PCs; it includes such well-known systems as WordSmith (Scott 1996), MonoConc (Barlow 2000), AntConc (Anthony 2005), and Xaira. Compared to the second generation, these concordancers are able to deal with large data sets on the PC (the hundred-million-word BNC is packaged with Xaira). Moreover, they include a wider range of tools than were previously available. Finally, they effectively support a range of writing systems.

Fourth Generation
The defining feature of fourth-generation concordancers is that they do not run on the user's own PC — instead, they are accessed via a web browser and actually run on a web server. These concordancers were created to address three issues:
The limited power of desktop PCs 
Problems arising from differing PC operating systems
Legal restrictions on the distribution of corpora
The most widely used are corpus.byu.edu (Davies 2005), Wmatrix (Rayson 2008), SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), and BNCweb (Hoffmann et al. 2008) and its clone CQPweb (Hardie forthcoming)
In concordance analysis, a keyword refers to the specific word or phrase being investigated. It serves as the basis for retrieving instances and examining their context within the corpus.
Example:
If we choose "climate change" as the keyword, a concordance analysis may reveal instances such as:
, , , , , , , , , ,The impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities are devastating.
Scientists are studying the causes and effects of climate change

Collocation refers to the habitual co-occurrence of words or phrases in a language. It involves words that tend to appear together due to their semantic or syntactic associations.
Example:
In a concordance analysis of the word "strong," collocates may include:
Strong coffee
Strong winds
Strong support
Identifying collocations helps to understand how words are used in combination, improving language proficiency.

WordSmith
WordSmith (or, more properly, WordSmith Tools), written by Mike Scott, is perhaps the most widely-used third-generation concordancer. It has been through several versions, all of which look a little different: here is a screenshot of a concordance in version 5.

AntConc
AntConc, written by Laurence Anthony, has approximately the same set of functions as WordSmith, but a different style of user interface.

Application of Corpus Linguistics
Language Analysis and Corpus Linguistics
Language Teaching and Learning
Translation and Language Services
Terminology Extraction and Domain Analysis
Stylistic and Literary Analysis