Linguistic analysis can have a variety of applications across several different mediums. A useful tool for conducting such analysis is a concordance search, which organizes every instance of a word or phrase in a body of text. Such a search has become more accessible as computer technology has developed. Making the search for a specific word or phrase much faster and easier, concordance searches are useful especially for linguistic analysts. Applications for a concordance search include analyzing word frequency and learning about usage patterns for words or phrases.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
In the field of text analysis, concordance searches are efficient ways of identifying patterns or studying word usage. In Introducing Electronic Text Analysis, Svenja Adolphs uses the example of searching through works of literature. Literary scholars have said about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that it contains a theme of vagueness and uncertainty. By using a concordance search for the word “vague” and its variants, these scholars can confirm the information about which they hypothesized. Such a search speeds up the human process of reading the book and picking out instances of vagueness and uncertainty, helping linguists who would rather not pore over pages and pages of text. Concordance searches are similarly efficient for those studying other literary or even academic works.
Concordance searches are helpful to analysts, but have certain fallacies for those seeking to learn about the occurrences of a certain word or phrase. A major drawback of these searches is that the context in which a word appears is not given or is only partial. Without the context surrounding a target word, the analyst’s ability to learn about how the word is used in a specific instance is blocked. This issue arises especially when dealing with words or phrases for which the meaning might be unclear. Words derived from a different language or idiomatic phrases can be particularly difficult, especially when the context for these items may be partial or not present. Though concordance searches may be much more efficient than manual analysis, analysts must be wary of potential problems they may run into during a search.
Concordance searches can be particularly effective and useful when comparing different texts against one another. Comparing the languages of different texts from the same place and the same time period can illustrate patterns in language, while conducting a search through texts of different time periods can illustrate changes in patterns. Searching for key words or phrases can be particularly enlightening for linguists as they study changes in language across years or even centuries. Though such analysis has been possible and has been conducted in the past, it is easier and more efficient with the help of concordance searches.
Search engines now help to shrink the ever-growing contents of the Internet, helping searchers pinpoint an exact idea or piece of information. Concordance searches exist in the same vein as search engines, but are more specialized and tailored for the purpose of analysis. Search engine giant Google has even directed its search capabilities to text analysis with Ngram Viewer, which allows users to search through one or more books for occurrences of a word or phrase. Such a move is one step in making concordance searches more accessible as a tool for text and literary analysis.