Querying keywords : questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis.

Baker, Paul (2004) Querying keywords : questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis. Journal of English Linguistics, 32 (4). pp. 346-359. ISSN 1552-5457

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Abstract

The corpus analysis program WordSmith Tools allows two corpora to be compared against each other in order to acquire a list of keywords: words that appear statistically more often in one text than the other. This article examines some potential problems of analyzing keywords and ways to overcome them. A keywords analysis may force the researcher to overplay differences rather than similarities, and it focuses on difference at the lexical rather than the semantic, grammatical, or pragmatic levels. An examination of dispersion patterns, concordances, and key clusters are useful supplementary forms of analysis. The use of annotated data to derive key categories or grouping like words into similar groups is also helpful.

Item Type:

Journal Article

Journal or Publication Title:

Journal of English Linguistics

Additional Information:

The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Journal of English Linguistics, 32 (4), 2004, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2004 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Journal of English Linguistics page: http://eng.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/

Uncontrolled Keywords:

/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3310

Subjects:

?? corpus • methodology • frequency • discourselinguistics and languagelanguage and linguisticspe english ??

Departments:

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences > Linguistics & English Language

ID Code:

26236

Deposited By:

Dr Paul Baker

Deposited On:

22 Apr 2009 12:06