Making simple queries to corpora
Concordancers
A concordancer is a software programme that searches through corpora and returns all the occurrences of your searchword(s) in their original contexts.
The exact interface and the language for making queries to a corpus depend on the concordancer you use. Most tools provide an option for a simple search for word forms, such as left behind or getting used to.
- To see how a freely available Internet corpus+concordancer works, try making a query for left using the Leeds CQP interface.
left in the Leeds Internet corpus
As you may have noticed, the previous search retrieves all the occurrences of the word form left, regardless of the lemma they belong to. Thus you get instances of left as a verb, as an adjective and as a noun. Looking for the exact string you have typed (word form) is the default behaviour of most concordancers.
What if you wanted to find all and only occurrences of the lemma LEFT, thus excluding verbs?
In the Leeds CQP interface you just need to add the percentage sign (%) after your search word.
- Try a search for left% and see if your results look like those below (selection).
lemma LEFT in the Leeds Internet corpus