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Part of
The Corpus Linguistics Discourse: In honour of Wolfgang Teubert
Edited by Anna Čermáková and Michaela Mahlberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 87] 2018
► pp. 9–34

The (very) long history of corpora, concordances, collocations and all that

| University of Trier

In the development of academic disciplines, important ideas are often proposed, forgotten, and then rediscovered much later, when they are connected to other ideas in a way which reveals their significance. I give examples of ideas which are often thought of as quite modern, although they have a very long history:

  • using corpora in constructing dictionaries and language teaching materials

  • using concordances as data for textual exegesis and information retrieval

  • using collocations as evidence of word meaning.

In all three cases the theoretical significance of the ideas became clear only after improved techniques of visualisation allowed patterns to be seen in complex non-numerical data.

Article outline
  • 1.Overview
  • 2.Previous work
  • 3.Concordancing content
  • 4.Index, verbal concordance and “real” concordance
  • 5.Concordancing form
  • 6.Meaning and use
  • 7.Practice and theory
  • 8.Digital corpora
  • 9.Collocation and phraseology
  • 10.Meaningful quantification
  • 11.KWIC (Key word in context) concordances
  • 12.Concordance packages and programming languages
  • 13.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.87.02stu
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