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Step-by-step guide to WordSmith

Navigation: Concordancing

Collocates and Mutual Information

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Here are the collocates of AGO computed using the written section of the BNC, ordered by frequency.

 

collocates_of_ago

 

There are nearly 17,000 instances of AGO, and YEARS is the top collocate, found about 9,000 times near AGO. So Years is obviously an important collocate. Nearly all its hits are found in position L1 -- that is one word to the left of ago.

However, there are more cases of the than of long , or months, weeks, etc.: what's needed is a way of knowing how closely each of these collocates of AGO is related to it. Are A, THE, WAS etc. really closely linked to AGO?  

 

If we now choose Compute | Relationships in the menu,

 

compute_mi_choice

 

and select a suitable word-list to use for the comparison:

 

choose_bnc_wordlist

 

then we get the following list when sorted by clicking the Relation column:

 

collocates_of_ago_sorted_by_mi

 

The top items in the list now reflect much better the tendency of AGO to accompany periods of time and numbers.