Concordancing and Language Learning
The following article introduces concordancing, a very useful tool for language instructors and users. Although the examples in this article are all in French, it can be used with any language.
By Betsy Kerr
I'd like to start by sharing this recent e-mail exchange between me and my colleague, Prof. Judith Preckshot:
Dear Betsy
I have a linguistic conundrum for you. Yesterday in my French class, I had the students translate problem words into French. One of them was including. My objective was to have them get y compris or some form of inclus, but one student insisted that he had been told in France that incluant [literal translation of including] was correct. Well, it is not in my dictionary, and it is only given on my 'Petit Robert' CD-Rom as a present participle, with no examples of usage. However, I went online to see whether it was in use, and I found a gazillion examples, but no text that explained its difference from y compris. Do you know where I can search for an answer?
Judy
I'm glad you asked that! I looked it up in my brand-new 'Grand Robert' CD-Rom (an extravagance I probably should not have allowed myself!) and found absolutely nothing, other than some obscure philosophical use of the word as a noun.
You did exactly what I would have done in such a situation--check Google. This is one way to do what linguists call concordancing. I noticed that a lot, but not all of the occurrences were from Canada. By doing an advanced search and specifying 'ca' as the domain, I found that 143,000 out of the total 315,000 occurrences were Canadian. Almost half. As for the others (108,000 came up in a search for 'fr'), one can look at the kinds of semantic domains in question: a lot of technical things. But there are still plenty of exceptions. i.e. more general type contexts.
Next I went to an online concordancer that allows one to search a corpus of all of Le monde [a leading French daily] for 1998 (132.208.224.131/Francord.htm). Of course, that's getting a little dated now, but it revealed 5 occurrences of 'incluant' vs. 68 occurrences of 'y compris'.
Conclusion: This is another example of creeping Anglicisms! Seriously, it is true that many Anglicisms that formerly would not have been acceptable are now becoming increasingly used and accepted. Not by purists, of course. So you probably won't find 'incluant' in literary texts. Personally, I would allow it, as I don't see why we should be more restrictive than the French (and the Canadians!). And of course, dictionaries will be slow to catch up.
Betsy
The previous e-mail exchange illustrates the use of concordancing to answer questions of current usage. I recommend concordancing as a linguistic reference tool for both instructors and advanced or exceptionally motivated students. Here are the basics of concordancing:
What is concordancing?
A type of computerized text analysis, long used by corpus linguists and literary scholars, employing a corpus and a concordancer.
CORPUS = An electronically-formatted text or set of texts, that represents a certain type of real-world language use, written or oral (transcription of recordings).
CONCORDANCER = A computer program that generates a concordance, a list of all occurrences of a given word or expression in the given corpus, with the context in which it occurs.
As an example, here is the concordance for"incluant" in the Le monde 1998 corpus generated by the online concordancer referred to above, Chris Greaves, 132.208.224.131/Francord.htm:
Concordances pour incluant avec mot associé = 5
- mars, 500 victimes de mutilations, incluant des amputations, avaient été admis
- s secrets de toutes sortes d'armes incluant des missiles anti-tanks type SAM-7
- e (CAP) : 300 millions de francs, incluant la restauration du bâtiment, la ré
- de francs d'économies, mais en y incluant le récent accord passé avec la CNAM
- cher les 50 millions de francs en incluant les résultats du Monde diplomatique
Here you see the KWIC (Key Word In Context) format generated by concordancers. Note that one can usually click on any occurrence of the key word to see the same item with an enlarged chunk of the context. Concordancing allows us to: Look at authentic language samples and zero in on a particular feature, whether it be lexical or grammatical, and to discover the patterns which characterize the use of that item in discourse.
Compare patterns in different types of discourse: spoken vs. written; literary, journalistic, administrative texts; etc.
Take the burden off the teacher or the reference grammar to 'know the answer,' by engaging the learner in discovering how the language works.
Specific Uses Of Concordancing
As a grammar reference, for the teacher's own personal language learning (Web search engines: www.yahoo.fr, Google).
For research that can guide the development of pedagogical materials (textbooks): what features should be taught when? Example: variant interrogative forms in conversation.
Actual concordances can be used as the basis for exercises and activities: students are asked to formulate generalizations on the basis of the data. With relevant items deleted, the concordance can be used as a fill-in-the-blank exercise.
Students can do their own research with a concordancer or Web search engine.
For practical suggestions on possible classroom uses of concordancing, I recommend Tribble and Jones, Concordances in the Classroom: A Resource Guide for Teachers. Houston, TX: Athelstan, 1997. Many different types of questions can be explored through concordancing, from the simple to the more complex:
Spelling: Is it en couleur or en couleurs?
Capitalization: Is it Français or français?
Collocations (words that frequently co-occur): What words (nouns) frequently occur after (as the object of) the verb tirer 'to pull, draw?' e.g. tirer des conclusions.
Uses of grammatical structures: How are demonstrative pronouns such as celui, celle, etc. used? Where does one place the que of the restrictive expression neŠque (= 'only')?
Lexico-grammatical features (interaction of words and grammatical structures): What kinds of complements does a particular verb take? e.g. souhaiter 'to wish' can take an infinitive, or a direct object + indirect object, or a clausal complement.
Derivational morphology (prefixes and suffixes): What kinds of words does the prefix anti- attach to? What is its meaning?
both mean 'in'. Amener and apporter both mean 'to bring'. Briser, casser, and rompre all are translated as 'to break'. How are these different? How are their contexts of use different?
Comparison of the same item or function in different types of discourse: e.g. relative frequencies of various interrogative forms in oral and written discourse; comparison of various past tenses in journalistic vs. literary texts.
Idiomatic expressions: What does montrer patte blanche ('show white paw') mean? Exploring this one led me not only to the answer to this question (to prove one's legitimacy, as by showing an ID card), but also to some interesting cultural content, when a French chatroom participant used the expression in a conversation about racism to talk about harassment of dark-skinned males by the police. Simple concordancing can be done with Google or Yahoo or any Web browser, but online concordancers designed for this purpose have certain advantages. For a bibliography and links to online concordancers in various languages, see my website at www.tc.umn.edu/~bjkerr/CSC_DDL_Bib.htm (or simply do a Google search for 'Betsy Kerr', which will bring up my faculty bio page where you'll find a link to this page).
If you have your own electronic corpus with which you'd like to do concordancing, the Conc program for Macs is available in Folwell 152 and can be downloaded at this Summer Institute of Linguistics site: www.sil.org/computing/conc/conc.html. PC users can make use of MonoConc Pro, an easy-to-use but versatile concordancer available in the Language Center. This program can be used with user-supplied texts or with any webpage.