Reading Concordances: An Introduction

Concord is a grammatical term in linguistics referring to the relationship between words whereby a form of one word requires a corresponding form of another eg the rules governing the singular and plural of 'he walks' as opposed to 'they walk'. This book describes the processes involved when we read concordances, using real life examples taken from spoken English corpuses (The Bank of English and Cobuild Corpuses). The book is a practical volume, providing exercises and examples taken from corpora as each topic is introduced. The reader is encouraged to build on their knowledge as they are taken through the topics step-by step so that eventually they can form a working hypothesis enabling them to make interesting linguistic observations.

John Sinclair is Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English and Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.