ABSTRACT
This chapter exemplifies the basics of frequency and concordance analysis. Frequency analysis can be done by anyone who has a collection of electronic texts, basic computer skills and the appropriate software. Concordancing is even more accessible, and can be carried out on corpora searchable via the internet as well as on those stored on a personal computer. Concordancing is particularly useful because the lines displayed can be sorted. It is important to point out that the example analyses that are presented in the chapter are limited to basic techniques involving counting and searching for single items, rather than the kinds of multi-word units referred to in Greaves and Warren. In order to compare frequency counts across corpora of different sizes, a process of normalisation is required. Investigating the discourse functions of particular forms is complicated by the fact that the items often have clause-level, as well as discourse-level, functions.
