Introduction

This chapter is the first of two that present some of the most commonly used methods and approaches in corpus linguistics. Producing concordance lines is perhaps the most basic way of processing corpus information, and most corpus users rely heavily on concordances and their interpretation. This is particularly true for those who are using a corpus in day-to-day teaching or translation, for whom an intuitive response to data may be more immediately useful than a more statistical approach. For this reason, concordance lines have a chapter to themselves in this book.

This chapter offers a number of examples of corpus searches, each one illustrating one or more points about the methodology of finding and interpreting concordance lines, and about the kind of findings that emerge from such study. In this chapter, a number of topics are addressed, which might be summarised as follows:

1. What kind of searches are useful in finding out about how English works? Examples are given of searches for a single word-form (e.g. point), for a lemma (e.g. CONDEMN), or for a series of words (e.g. on ADJECTIVE terms with). Sometimes a search is designed to show not the words searched for but a concept that often co-occurs with it (e.g. what would co-occurring with expressions of hypotheticality). In some of the examples given, a series of searches has to be conducted, because a single search cannot give the required data in manageable form (e.g. a very frequent word such as point).

2. […]