REFLECTION ON WEEK 8 :CONCORDANCE AND CONCORDANCER
Concordance is a list of words in a particular text and concordancer is a tool that constructs a concordance. In other words, concordancer is software that many Corpus linguists used to make a list of a particular word faster than doing it manually. Concordancer can translate any text even a large text like al-Qur’an, Bible, Vedas, Shakespeare’s works and others. Other than just make a word list, concordancer can also count the frequency and percentage of each and every word in a context. Whereby, the context also can be selected and arranged.
Concordancer is used in many fields of learning such as in language teaching and learning, corpus linguistics, lexicography and many more which is any subject that involve language. Nevertheless, other subjects which are more general and do not use the language much are also can be analysed by the concordancer as long as they are in written form. For the exemplified, marketing, accountancy, musicology and more.
Concordancer can be used by lay people, students and working people also. It does not limit only for Corpus linguists. There are three main concordancer programs and others that can be used in PC. The first one is, “The Oxford Concordance Program” (OCP). It is widely used because of its reliability, flexibility and straightforward. It is also best at making wordlists, concordances, indexes, analysing any large corpora in any language and lastly can handle various text formats.
The second concordance program is “Word Cruncher” where it is widely used for interactive concordancing. This program has pros and cons. Best thing about this program is it can retrieve any lexical extremely fast and can rapidly exploring a large text. In contrast, the program is not that flexible for sorting and formatting output analyses and as well for exploring syntactic phenomena.
The third one is called “Tact”. It is famously used for any corpus analysis because it is a research oriented program. It studies vocabulary as to show distribution in texts, the associate characters of particular words, frequency, a tendency of a particular word to occur in a particular text, collocation and also for descriptive language studies.
The other well known concordancers are “The Child Language Analysis” (CLAN), COALA and “The Longman Mini Concordancer” (LMC). LMC is a classroom concordancer and it is simple, fast and easy to use. Hence, after got to know all about concordance and concordancer, students can learn or analyse language easier than before. If before, students did not know the syntax, semantics, grammar, usage and meaning for a specific sentence, and now they can with the help of concordancer.
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