HELP

The search form of the application is divided into five different areas: Search, Result, Sensitivity, Filters, and Orthographic words. Find below the elements under each of these categories and the most important functionalities of the application.

Search

Within the Search area, a single selector is shown, Type; this selector allows you to indicate the type of search you want to conduct. The following values are included:

• Orthographic words: It allows you to search for orthographic words, that is, items as they appear written in the text. You can search for up to five consecutive words.
• Grammatical elements: It allows you to search for grammatical elements. On many occasions a word coincides with a grammatical element (for instance, place), but on others, for example in contractions (we’re = we + are), this is not the case, here we have one orthographic word but two grammatical elements.
• Orthographic words prox.: It enables searches for words at a distance of less than or equal to 10.
• Grammatical elements prox.: It enables searches for grammatical elements at a distance of less than or equal to 10.

Result

In the area Result four selectors can be found: Result type, Sorting, Grouping and Page size.

• Result type: As its name suggests, this selector determines the type of result we want to obtain. There are five options:
  • Samples: This option allows you to obtain a list with all the documents in the corpus. It is also possible to access the full text by clicking on the number associated with each of the documents shown.
  • Simple frequency: You can obtain a numerical result that indicates the number of times a word or grammatical element appears (depending on the type of search specified) in the corpus. The result obtained shows both the absolute number and the relative number (cases per million) of matches, as well as the number of documents in which it appears.
  • Full frequency: This option offers a similar result to the previous one, but the result is broken down according to the main classification criteria of the documents in the corpus.
  • KWIC: It allows you to obtain the matches of a search in their context (Key Word In Context). Once the result is obtained, it is possible to display a broader context of any of the matches by clicking on the corresponding result number.
  • Matching expressions: This last option allows you to obtain the different matches of a search. Unlike KWIC searches, this option groups together all the different cases that match a search, making it easier to know which matches are more frequent.

Sensitivity

You can choose whether our search will be case sensitive or not. If the checkboxes are unchecked, the application will search for matches regardless of their case.

Filters

You can filter or narrow down your search according to a series of variables. Click on the question mark symbol for further details. For example, you can filter the output according to: the speakers’ mother tongue (L1), the learners’ proficiency level(s), their gender, the age of the learner, the age at which the learner was exposed to English, etc.

Orthographic words / Grammatical elements

Depending on the value chosen in the selector, either a text box is displayed in this area, which allows you to search for orthographic words, or four independent boxes are displayed, which allow you to search for grammatical elements.

To search for grammatical elements, you can indicate the grammatical element, the morphosyntactic tag, the lemma and/or the orthographic word in which it is included. By clicking on the tag icon, you can access a friendly menu where you can enter the information corresponding to the morphosyntactic tag.

If you click on the button with the + symbol, shown on the right, additional grammatical elements can be indicated, these elements must appear after the previous ones.For example, if you want to find examples of the verb ‘stand’ followed by the adverb ‘up’, you should follow these steps:

• Choose, in the selector Type of the Search area, the value Grammatical element.
• Click on the tag icon in the Grammatical elements area, choose the Verb category and click on the OK button.
• Fill in the Lemma field with the word ‘stand’.
• Click on the + button, and in the second row just displayed, fill in the Grammatical element box, in this case ‘up’.
• Finally, click on the Search button.

If you have any queries or doubts regarding the use of this tool, please contact us using the contact form.