WordSkew: Linking corpus data and discourse structure

Barlow, Michael

doi:10.1075/ijcl.21.1.05bar

Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 21:1 (2016) ► pp.105–115

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WordSkew

Linking corpus data and discourse structure

Michael Barlow | University of Auckland

Published online: 31 March 2016

https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21.1.05bar

In this article, I provide a brief introduction to the operation and motivation behind the text analysis tool WordSkew. This program, currently available for Windows, is a variant of a typical concordance program. The distinguishing feature of the software is that it allows the user to specify the units of discourse and apposite ways of segmenting the discourse. The results of a search query are then given with respect to each segment. For example, sentences might be divided into ten segments (based on word counts) and the frequency of the search term is then provided for each segment. This process is repeated as required for other textual units.

Keywords: tools, discourse structure, concordance, text analysis, distribution

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