Embedded Files
Concordancers
Concordancers
The image on the left is an example of the concordancing tool, which retrieves all the examples of a query term from a corpus. This allows language learners and linguists to examine a series of examples of a particular word or phrase more easily by placing them all next to each other. This is valuable because language is often used differently to what we might intuitively expect. The search term make, when thought of in isolation, may be described as being similar in meaning to the verb create, by referring to the physical act of making something. In reality though, make is rarely used in this way, and more commonly forms phrases such as make a mistake or make use of. As such, the concordancing tool can be a valuable study aid because it makes explicit what we might miss simply by reading individual texts independently.
The example above is taken from the British National Corpus, accessed via the Sketch Engine. Each example carries information about the source text (i.e. whether it was taken from a novel, radio broadcast etc.). There's also useful contextual information for each term. The word make and its inflections appear 210,667 times in the corpus, which equates to 1,875 per million words. This makes it the 6th most common verb in the corpus. Learning how it's used to construct phrases such as make do and make up as well as collocations such as make sense helps language learners sound more natural and develop an ear for terms that native speakers are often unaware they're even using.
Collocations
Collocations
You shall know a word by the company it keeps. (Firth, 1957)
Collocations are pairs or clusters of words that appear together more frequently than would be expected by chance. The Sketch Engine's Word Sketch feature shows the collocations of a given word organised by parts of speech. So, from these results we can see that the word make is most often used in phrases such as make sure or make a decision. Knowing which words collocate with which helps language learners develop a more natural feel to their speech and writing. The three dots to the right of each word open up a menu which allows users to explore concordance examples of each collocation, so they can see the collocation used in a series of examples. So far the examples have focused on general English via the British National Corpus (BNC); however, for examples of language use from academic writing we could utilise the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus.
Word comparisons
Word comparisons
This is a tool specific to the Sketch Engine, and allows users to compare the collocations of two words. English students might know that make and create are near synonyms, but are probably unaware of which words each one naturally combines with. These search results tell us that we make a decision but create an opportunity. This kind of tool is particularly useful when trying to use a more formal register, as students are often required to do in academic English.
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