I’ve never put much thought into how meaningful a simple word can be. Whether it is found in a long sentence or a small phrase, a word is what completes that sentence or phrase and adds significance to what it is trying to express. In Introducing Electronic Text Analysis, Svenja Adolphs discusses how corpus linguistics is used to analyze texts. This is used to understand the language and patterns of words. Corpus linguistics analyzes the frequency of a word or phrase. Once you type in the word that it is that you want to find, a frequency list appears which shows all the times the word shows up. I consider this to be a very helpful technique because it helps the reader understand the author’s language. It also helps the reader comprehend and analyze the words surrounding that word.
The analysis of individual words and phrases not only gives us the characterization of the text but also the description of individual items. The concordance output shows the occurrences of a particular search item in a corpus. This reveals the language description as well as the patterns. The results of concordance can be a bit overwhelming at times but for the most part very helpful. There are different types of explorations through electronic analysis of literary texts but they continue to expand.
Today’s evolving technology has given us the opportunity to investigate the power of words in a text. Through corpus linguistics one is able to look through a mixture of writings throughout history. This tool shows us how writing and meanings of words have evolved through time. Concordance searched gives us the opportunity to compare texts though the style, patterns, language, etc. I find this to be extremely helpful as well as interesting because we get to see how a word has changed with time.