Concordancing software

In empirical approaches to linguistics, corpus analysis has become an indispensable method for gaining insights into many areas of linguistic inquiry, from lexical semantics and grammar to psycholinguistics and discourse pragmatics. Apart from more computationally oriented tasks associated with corpora, such as lemmatization, tagging, and parsing, corpus-linguistic research revolves around a number of routine procedures such as searching a corpus for a particular phenomenon, counting, organizing, and displaying the results. Among these elementary tasks, the creation of concordances, i. e., formatted displays of all the occurrences of a particular type in a corpus, may be considered the most fundamental task. Thus reliable, fast, and user-friendly search-and-retrieval software is of great value to any researcher working in this field.