Context Word

 

You may restrict a concordance search by specifying a context word which either must or may not be present within a certain number of words of your search word.

For example, you might have book as your search word and hotel* as the context word. This will only find book if hotel or hotels is nearby.

Or you might have book as your search word and paper* as an exclusion criterion. This will only find book if paper or papers is not within your Context Search Horizons.

 

Context Search Horizons

 

The context horizons determine how far Concord must look to left and right of the search word when checking whether the search criteria have been met. The default is 5,5 (5 to left and 5 to right of the search word) but this can be set to up to 25 on either side. 0,2 would look only to the right within two words of the search word.

 

context_word_dialogue

In this example the search-word is beautiful and the context word is lady, to be sought either left or right of beautiful.

 

Syntax is like that of the search word or phrase,

*        means disregard the end of the word and can be placed at either end of your context word.

==        means case sensitive

/        separates alternatives. You can specify up to 15 alternatives within an 80-character overall limit.

If you want to use *, ? , == , ~ , :\ or / as a character in your search word, put it in double quotes, e.g. "*"

 

beautiful lady

In line 14, the search-word and the context-word are in separate sentences. To avoid this, specify a suitable stop as shown here:

 

specify_context_barrier

and with the same settings you will get results like these:

 

beautiful lady_sentence_barrier

 

If you have specified a context word, you can re-sort on it. Also, the context words will be in their own special colour.

 

Note: the search only takes place within the current concordance line with the number of characters defined as characters to save. That is, if for example you choose search horizons 25L and 25R, but only 1000 characters are saved in each line, there might not be 25 words on either side of the search-word to examine when seeking the context word or phrase if there was extensive mark-up as well.

 

 

 

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