Concordance – a list of examples in context
A concordance is a list of all examples of the search word (also called a keyword or query) or a phrase from a text corpus accompanied with some context to the left and some context to the right. Until the arrival of Word Sketches, concordances were the main tools to retrieve information from corpora. The screenshot below shows the most frequently used format called a KWIC concordance where the search word is highlighted in the centre of the screen and an equal amount of context is displayed to the right and left.
An example of an advanced concordance: examples of grow followed by words similar to tomato within 4 tokens from grow. The user set the view options to display tags for the search word and the text type for each example.
Why use concordances?
In the early days of corpus linguistics, concordances were quite basic. On the other hand nowadays, concordances should be used only for specific tasks which cannot be achieved via Word Sketches and other features.