[Corpora-List] Stop-list in Wodrsmith Tools Concord

Mon Jan 3 16:56:04 UTC 2011

Dear John,

As far as I know, the stoplist works with lists rather than with concordances. So use any noun as search word and check the Collocates for the inclusion of function words in order to see whether your stoplist works.

Normally, you should not need a stoplist for concordances (i.e. you wouldn't not look for "the" if you know that the programme will exclude examples with "the"). In case you use wildcards (e.g. words starting with "the*"), you would need to use the "Advanced" and "exclude if context contains", listing all the words to exclude (e.g. the/they/them/these/then/there...) with a horizon of L0/R0. I do not think that it is possible to use lists in this function, as normally the relevant sets should be limited.

I hope I have not completely misunderstood your question.

All the best

Georg
________________________________________
Von: corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] im Auftrag von John MCKENNY [john.mckenny at nottingham.edu.cn]
Gesendet: Montag, 03. Jänner 2011 16:43
An: corpora at uib.no
Betreff: [Corpora-List] Stop-list in Wodrsmith Tools Concord

Could anyone help me with a problem I have encountered with Wordsmith Tools. I am working with  a large corpus of more than 7 million words and I want to focus on  a large set of technical, sub-technical and content words without too much noise from function words. I made a stop-list of such words as instructed in the extensive help file where it mentions that Key word, Concord and Wordlist  tools can  use a stop list. I loaded this .stp file and each time I tested a small part of my corpus using the
as   a search word I  got a full concordance of the in that small section.  My stoplist  hadn't worked.
Have I misunderstood the use of stoplist in Concord?   Is there something wrong with my stoplist file or my use of the Concord settings?
Thank you for any help you might give
All the best for 2011
John McKenny

Division of English Studies
University of Nottingham Ningbo, China
199 Taikang Dong Lu
Ningbo, Zhejiang Province
P.R.China   315100
Tel +86(0)574 8818 0271
Fax +86(0)574 8818 0125

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