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Analysing Keyword Lists

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A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

Frequency lists are useful in their own right for assisting a linguist, lexicographer, language teacher, or learner analyse or exploit a corpus. When employed comparatively through the keywords approach, significant changes in the relative ordering of words can flag points of interest. This conceptually simple approach of comparing one frequency list against another has been very widely exploited in corpus linguistics to help answer a vast number of research questions. In this chapter, we describe the method step-by-step to produce a keywords list, and then highlight two representative studies to illustrate the usefulness of the method. In our critical assessment of the keywords method, we highlight issues related to corpus design and comparability, the application of statistics, and clusters and n-grams to improve the method. We also describe important software tools and other resources, as well as providing further reading.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Online calculators and downloadable spreadsheets are available at http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/sigtest/ (accessed 25 June 2019) and http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html (accessed 25 June 2019).

  2. 2.

    It should be noted that this formula represents the 2-cell calculation (Rayson and Garside 2000) which can be used since the contribution from the other two cells is fairly constant and does not affect the ranking order. Other tools, e.g. AntConc, and statistical calculators also support the 4-cell calculation incorporating contributions from frequencies of the other words into the Log-Likelihood value.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster, UK

    Paul Rayson

  2. Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Amanda Potts

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  1. Paul Rayson
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  2. Amanda Potts
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Correspondence to Paul Rayson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. FNRS Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Language and Communication Institute, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Magali Paquot

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Stefan Th. Gries

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Rayson, P., Potts, A. (2020). Analysing Keyword Lists. In: Paquot, M., Gries, S.T. (eds) A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46216-1_6

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