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- Title
Concordancing for CADS: Practical challenges and theoretical implications.
- Authors
Gillings, Mathew; Mautner, Gerlinde
- Abstract
Concordance analysis is widely recognised as one of the main techniques in a corpus linguist's toolkit. However, despite a growing body of work critically exploring previously unquestioned mainstays of corpus methods (Mautner, 2015; Taylor & Marchi, 2018), this has not focused on concordance analysis specifically. In this paper, we aim to discuss issues that researchers may encounter when interpreting concordances. We begin in Step One with a cursory examination of 800 concordance lines in order to identify potential issues. In Step Two, we assess the distribution of those issues in a reduced sample of 200. As a result, we identify eight interpretability issues: noise in the corpus, non-standard syntax, unclear referring expressions, unclear quotation source attribution, technical terms/jargon, acronyms/initialisms, unspecific co-text, and lines unrelated to the research question. After reflecting on practical challenges, we discuss the epistemological implications of removing concordance lines uncritically and suggest ten recommendations for future work.
- Subjects
RESEARCH questions; CONCORDANCES; RESEARCH personnel; ACRONYMS; SYNTAX (Grammar)
- Publication
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2024, Vol 29, Issue 1, p34
- ISSN
1384-6655
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/ijcl.21168.gil