PLEASE note - these pages are no longer maintained. Some links may not work.

Welcome to the tutorial for
the W3-Corpora Interface
Here you can find information about how to use the search engine together with some hints about what to think about when working with corpora.

To access the search engine now, click
HERE

Some information of how the tool can be used can be found below.

The W3-Corpora interface is a search engine made to be used to on large collections of text of various kinds, so called "corpora". The tool will search for the word/phrase you enter in the corpus you choose and display the examples, hits, on the screen. Irrespective of what kind of search you want to make, the procedure is the same.

Search procedure

First go to the Search Engine page. (You will find links to the Search Engine at all pages in the tutorial)
  1. Choose the corpus you wish to search in on the Corpus Selection Page.
    (More information about things to think about when selecting a corpus can be found HERE (link to be added).
  2. Enter the word/phrase you are interested in on the Search String page.
    You will be prompted to select the kind of search string you want to look for and type that string.
  3. Search
    The Search Engine will go through the corpus you selected and look for the string you entered. The result is displayed on the screen.
  4. View the hits
    There are several options for how to view the results of the search. These are presented in more detail in connection to the examples below. You can also read about them HERE.
You will find a more detailed introduction to how you make a search on the Help pages in the Search Engine section. You can also access those pages HERE.

Suggested uses

The W3-Corpora search engine is designed to handle corpora of different kinds. The tool will only search the corpora and display the results on the screen. All subsequent analyses have to be made by you. It is therefore important that you learn about what you can use corpora for, how to do it and, not least, how to avoid some of the drawbacks and pitfalls that may otherwise cause you trouble.

The list below displayes some of the areas where you may find corpora useful. Click on the links to get examples and illustrations of how you can use the W3-Corpora tool. Each section describes a problem/research question and shows how you can deal with it by using the W3-Corpora tool. You will find illustrations to each example, and a discussion of how the results can be interpreted. Each section is concluded with suggestions of further exercises.

Even if you do not need help with how to use the search engine, you may find that reading through the exercises will give you some insight into the potentials and pitfalls of using coprora.

Corpus Linguistics

If you want to learn more about corpora and how they can be used, go to the Corpus Linguistics pages. If you want to use the search engine now, click HERE.

W3-Corpora project. 1996-8 Contact us.