ConcGram List Builder (1) ©

ConcGram is a program for concordancing and concgram text analysis. It has the same concordancing functionality for English as ConcApp, but with additional functions to perform automated as well as user specified Concgram searches. Concgrams are patterns of word associations, and you can use ConcGram to find all the word associations in a text, both grammatical and semantic, and patterns are listed by frequency of ocurrence. Concgrams may be 2, 3, 4 or 5-word patterns of word association.

• ConcGram is available on CD from John Benjamins' website.

Online Help Contents

Getting Started

1. The Corpus

The first thing to do is open a corpus file to interrogate. If this is an MS Word document (ie _____.DOC) it must be saved by MS Word as a "Plain Text" file (ie _____.TXT).  Use the "Save As" menu option from the "File" menu in Word. 

2. Save the file

When you click the "Save" button after selecting "Plain Text" from the dropdown list, a File Conversion Dialog appears. You should check the "Insert Line Breaks" option and leave everything else to the default, then click OK.   

3. Merging several smaller files into one larger corpus file

If you have a number of small corpus files they need to be merged into one larger file. The concgram automated list only works with a single corpus file which must be opened first.

To create the corpus file from the command prompt:

• Navigate to where the files are, for instance a directory named C:\CONCGRAM\CORPUS
• To get there open the command prompt (START->RUN->CMD in Windows XP, in earlier versions of the operating system PROGRAMS->ACCESSORIES->MS DOS PROMPT), then type CD C:\ and press ENTER to change to the root directory of the C drive.
• Now type CD C:\CONCGRAM\CORPUS and press ENTER
• Type DIR to list all the files
• When you have verified that you are in the correct directory, type COPY *.* MYCORPUS.TXT where MYCORPUS.TXT is the name of the file that you will create for your merged corpus.

4. Open ConcGram

Open ConcGram by clicking on the "START" button and going to "All Programs".  Select "ConcGram".

5. Open the corpus file

To open the corpus file click on the FILE >> OPEN menu option, and select from the file from the window.

6. Run a single word search for a specific item

You can select the CONCORDANCE >> SEARCH menu option (see Figure 3 below for the toolbar buttons for the search functions).  Enter the word you wish to search for into the Concordance Dialog Box - make sure you select the OPEN FILE option to search the corpus file which you have already opened.  Click OK and all the instances of the search word will be listed.

7. Run an associated word search

Select the CONCGRAMS >> CONCGRAMS SEARCH (USER SPECIFIED)  menu option.  Enter the words you wish to search for (2 - 5 words).  Set the span to what you want, and click OK.  The corpus file will be searched and the concgrams listed accordingly. Up to six colours can be used in the display to more easily identify the concgram members. 

8. Run an automated search

This will take some time to execute.  To run an automated search select CONCGRAMS >> CREATE NEW CONCGRAM LIST (AUTOMATED) and choose one of the options. 

You will then be asked to choose options from the Concgrams List Preferences Dialog Box which has the following choices:

 

What preferences you select may depend upon the size of the corpus you are interrogating.  A corpus file of spoken English of about 1 million words and 18,000 unique words will take about a day to create the initial 2-word concgram  list. If you decide only to search for words beginning with a single letter, the initial list will be completed much more quickly.  See the explanatory notes for creating automated searches for further details.   

Why concgrams?  Next page ->