Week 11 · AntConc: Concordances, Keywords, Collocations

Nov 23, 2026 · ← Course home

Planned session. AntConc, the free workhorse of corpus linguistics, installed on everyone’s machine. Concordancing: reading a word through its company — KWIC lines, sorting, extended context. Keyword analysis: which words are unusually frequent in your corpus compared with a reference corpus, and why that is a stylistic question first and a statistical one second. Collocations and clusters: the phrase-grammar of a text.

Hands-on throughout: each group runs its own mini-corpus from Week 10 through the full toolchain and interprets what comes out. This session feeds directly into the midterm corpus-experiment report.

Key concepts: KWIC/concordance; keyness; collocation; cluster/n-gram; reference corpus.

Slides, tool links, a practice corpus and the lab worksheet will be posted here after class.