Hello world!!! We meet again in my blog and this is my 4th posting for this week. Our lecturer, Pn.Zaini has suggested me to work on about concordance and to be honest, I didn’t really understand about this concordance item exactly. Based on my research through the Oxford Dictionary, it said that concordance means index of the words used in a book or in an author’s works. For this 4th posting, we have been asked to work on it by pair and I’ve chosen my last partner, NUR HASLIZA BINTI JAMIL because she can give his full cooperation about the task given. Based from our reading through the OTL book, it said that concordance software such as Wordsmith, MonoConc Pro and Microconcod can help in the potential of a corpus in language pedagogy. Teachers, researchers and even language learners typically examine concordance lines to discover how words and grammatical constructions are used. However, in the Malaysian context, the use and analysis of language corpora has been somewhat limited. As Houston (2002) notes, ‘The essence of work on learner corpora is comparison.’ The values in this study, therefore, can be regarded as benchmarks against which to compare future groups of students as well as asses the development of the language program in Malaysia in general.
This is one of our selected journals about applications of concordance:-
The purpose of a concordance is to study how words are used in a language, and to allow us to acquire a deeper understanding of meaning and usage than can be obtained from a dictionary. As an example, consider the words tan and auburn. Both can be used to mean a color; both indicate a brownish hue. This much you can find in a dictionary. But in a dictionary, you would not find that auburn is used frequently to describe hair color but never to describe skin color. Nor would you find that tan is not used to describe hair. But a concordance which uses a large amount of text from the target language could show you many occurrences of these two words at a glance (and other meanings as well, of course, such as the use of tan as an abbreviation of a trigonometric tangent). In this way you could infer how native speakers use the words, and how these usages may be limited to specific situations.
Acquiring this sense of how words are actually used (as opposed to just what they mean) will help in creating the best possible translations. For example, if you were reading an English story in which someone’s skin was described as auburn, you would immediately know that something unusual was intended: perhaps, for example, it is used for comic effect.
Your translation, then, would attempt to accomplish the intended comic effect in the target language. If you didn’t know that auburn was not normally used to describe skin, but only know that it is a brownish-red color, you would probably just translate the word to the target-language equivalent and lose the intended comic effect.
Clearly, the more text that goes into a concordance, the more useful the results will be. Doing a concordance on a sentence or paragraph cannot tell you very much about patterns of usage in the language. Most European languages already have electronic versions of tens or even hundreds of megabytes of text which are publicly available. A single such collection is called a corpus – plural corpora. Some corpora consist of a broad selection of materials from the language – novels, plays, newspaper articles, transcriptions of authentic speech, and so on. Others are specialized – religious documents or political writings or the works of a single author, etc. Clearly, if you are studying the works of Shakespeare you would want his collected plays and poems in a corpus and nothing more. If you are interested in the language of current events, you would want newspapers or political writings. But if you are interested in written language in general, you would want as broad a selection as possible.
The less commonly taught languages generally do not have prepared corpora. For this course, some medium-sized corpora have been prepared for your use For the concordance programs supplied with this course, you will be able to create your own corpora by downloading documents from the internet or obtaining electronic version of texts in other ways. Most likely these corpora will not reach megabyte size, but using your own data with our concordance programs should give you a good feel for the way that concordances can be used. In fact, the concordance programs used in this course were not developed to process megabytes of text data. There are professional concordance programs available that can do that, and there are web sites (for some European languages, including English) that can access huge corpora.
From what did we mention at the beginning of this posting, a concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur’an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them. Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much manual work, because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances.
However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper. A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on text. A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, with the immediate context of the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the verse. The most well known topical concordance is Bible. The first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible, was compiled by Hugo de Saint Charo (d.1262), who employed 500 monks to assist him. In 1448 Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years. 1599 saw a concordance to the Greek New Testament published by Henry Stephens and the Septuagint was done a couple of years later by Conrad Kircher in 1602. The first concordance to the English bible was published in 1550 by Mr Marbeck, according to Cruden it did not employ the verse numbers devised by Robert Stephens in 1545 but “the pretty large concordance” of Mr Cotton did. Then followed the notorious Cruden’s Concordance and Strong’s Concordance.
Use in linguistics
Concordances are frequently used as a tool in linguistics that can be used for the study of a text, such as:
- comparing different usages of the same word
- analyzing keywords
- analyzing word frequencies
- finding and analyzing phrases and idioms
- finding translations of sub sentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation memories
- Creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing).
REFERENCES:-1) www.wikipedia.org2) www.seasite.niu.edu3) www.lextutor.ca4) www.petersteffens.com5) www.heinleinsociety.org6) www.ehow.comHope that you have got some information on concordance and its applications through our posting. Happy surfing!!!!
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