ABSTRACT
Following on from the analysis of frequencies in different texts and text collections introduced in the last chapter, this chapter will deal with the analysis of individual words and phrases at the concordance level. As such, it moves from the characterization of texts and text-types to the description of individual items. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, frequency lists can be a good starting point for concordance searches and can be used to generate hypotheses about the relationship between particular linguistic choices and different domains of discourse. Individual words or phrases might be chosen on the basis of their significance to a particular research question. An analysis of how age and ageing is represented in the media, for example, might prompt an analysis of those items that refer to the process of ageing. Concordance analyses can thus again be used both to generate and to test hypotheses, as well as to automate manual processes of counting words and structures.
