Gist of discussion on concordance
For the last posting on blogging, we need to post a topic about concordance. For this posting, we need to do a pair work, so, I choose Khairun Nadhrah Suhaimi as my partner to do this task. The article we need to discuss is “Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordance to Investigate Language Development” by Arshad Abd Samad in OTL book page 70.
This article emphasizes the significant of concordance and the advantages of using this software in analyzing language data, on how words and grammatical construction are used. The software has totally proves that it gives a lot of worth towards the teachers, researchers and even language learners in examining the concordance lines.
EMAS Corpus which was used in the study collected in 2002 consists of close to half a million words. It is an untagged and unedited learner corpus that contains written data in the form of three essays written by about 800 students which comprises of year 5, form 1 and form 4. The topics were based on the amount of language the topic could elicit. As such, topics and tasks were selected because students were expected to be able to write more because of their familiarity with the task and topic.
Various methods can be used to determine language development. A basic assumption made in this article is that developmental patterns can be implied by comparing the language use of three different age groups. In this article, developmental patterns are examined by studying the language productivity, range of vocabulary and sophistication vocabulary of the students.
Productivity in this article is indicated by the number of sentences per essay in the words per sentence. The productivity of the three age groups is compared in order to examine language development. As for the range of the vocabulary, the diversity of the vocabulary used in a corpus is often determined by calculating the type to token the ration (Schmitt, 2002). Specialized software such as RANGE is used in determining the sophistication of the vocabulary.
Therefore, although concordance software can be used to help analyze the language data available, many may still be easily be disturbed by the huge amount of data available. This article has attempted to present the relevant of corpus data in investigating language development without having to analyze concordance lines. The values in this study, thus, can be regarded as benchmarks against which to compare future groups of students as well as assess the development of the language program.
Applications of concordance in: literary work and linguistic
Suppose you are required to search a word in a particular poem within a limited of time. Of course you wouldn’t have the time to search for the exact word in the poem especially when the poem is too long and have many words that will make you even more confusing. So, therefore, Concordance is the best solution in solving this matter.
Concordances gather all the words of a certain work or author and arrange them in alphabetical order. Each word is followed by a citation to the appropriate line or passage where the word appears. Most concordances include the surrounding words or line in which the word appears. For instance, if you look up the word of “ABROAD” in the poem Lyrical Ballads (Bristol, 1798) written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, you will find:
ABROAD..............3 There's neither horse nor man abroad, Idiot Boy "There's not a single soul abroad." Idiot Boy And who is she, be-times abroad, Idiot Boy
A concordance doesn’t do your thinking or investigating for you, any more than a computer does. You have to ask the right questions, you have to follow up your own hunches and insights. A concordance is a matchless tool for investigating texts. Its power is limited only by its user’s imagination.
A computer concordance can now be prepared relatively easily provided a suitable e-text is available. However, in practice a good deal of editorial work is required in the early stages if a reliable concordance is wanted, and to produce a concordance of a quality suitable for publication in book form is generally reckoned to take around 2000 hours.
REFERENCES:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english.
