Mike Scott, School of EnglishUniversity of Liverpool.ppt

* Here’s the full set * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * status of the “key words” Keyness * Concgram section Keyness * What is a “concgram”? For years it has been easy to search for or identify consecutive clusters (n-grams) such as AT THE END OF MERRY CHRISTMAS TERM TIME. It has also been possible to find non-consecutive linkages such as STRONG within the horizons of TEA by adapting searches to find context words. In such cases we might get ...STRONG blah blah blah TEA... ...TEA blah blah blah blah STRONG... etc. * The concgram procedure takes a whole corpus of text and finds all sorts of combinations like ...STRONG blah blah blah TEA... ...TEA blah blah blah blah STRONG... ...STRONG TEA... ...TEA STRONG... whether consecutive or not... a sequence (n-gram) within a concordance span. (“skip-gram” is used (Wilks 2005) to describe non-contiguous word associations but doesn’t include TEA […] STRONG) * Cheng, Greaves Warren (2006) For our purposes, a ‘concgram’ is all of the permutations of constituency variation and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words. This means that the associated words comprising a particular concgram may be the source of a number of ‘collocational patterns’ (Sinclair 2004:xxvii). In fact, the hunt for what we term ‘concgrams’ has a fairly long history dating back to the 1980s (Sinclair 2005, personal communication) when the Cobuild team at the University of Birmingham led by Professor John Sinclair attempted, with limited success, to devise the means to automatically search for non-contiguous sequences of associated words. Cheng, Greaves Warren (2006:414) * ConcGram (?) aims to be a search-engine, which on top of the capability to handle constituency variation (i.e. AB, ACB), also handles positional variation (i.e. AB, BA), conducts fully automated searches, and searches for word associations of any size. (2006:413) WSConcGram is developed in homage to this idea. * The goal