Grammar's Little Words

In English, perfect and continuous aspects, the passive, causative and conditionals are formed by auxiliaries in contrast to many languages where they are formed with suffixes. Auxiliaries are words, and this is what concordancers work with best.

Corpus query language (CQL) targets searches precisely. The following examples use CQLs to find the given structures in the e-flux corpus, a publicly available corpus at sketchengine.co.uk. For detailed information on using CQL, you can download a pdf here.

In the left column below, the words in capitals are LEMMAs. Click on these to see examples.

The words in italics are words that occur in structures. And the words in normal type are parts of speech. You can see how each one is represented in the CQL examples provided.