WordSmith Tools is a software package primarily for linguists, in particular for work in the field of

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is the study of language, study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feas ...

. It is a collection of modules for searching patterns in a language. The software handles many languages.

Development and acquisition

The program suite was developed by the British linguist Mike Scott at the

University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

and released as version 1.0 in 1996. It was based on MicroConcord co-developed by Mike Scott and Tim Johns, published by Oxford University Press in 1993. Versions 1.0 through 4.0 were sold exclusively by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

, the current version 8.0 and previous versions are now also distributed by Lexical Analysis Software Limited. The software runs under Windows. WordSmith is a download-only product which is registered by entering a code costing 50 pounds sterling for a single user license. However, WordSmith 4.0 can now be downloaded and used free.

Functionality and applications

The core areas of the software package includes three modules: * '' Concord'' is used to create concordances, so all the hits from a search within a previously defined

body text __NOTOC__ The body text or body copy is the text forming the main content of a book, magazine, web page, or any other printed or digital work. This is as a contrast to both additional components such as headings, images, charts, footnotes etc. on ...

. * ''WordList'' lists all the

Word A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...

s or on

word form In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Mor ...

s that are included in the selected corpus and statistical data are different from the text corpus. * ''KeyWord'' creates a list of all those words and word forms according to certain statistical criteria in the text corpus significantly occur rarely or frequently. Each of the modules offers a number of other features in relation to the text corpus or text being analysed. Thus, for example,

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words th ...

and dispersion plots are computed with a concordance search. In addition, there are a number of additional modules that are useful for the preparation, clean-up and format the text corpus. WordSmith Tools can be used in 80 different languages. WordSmith Tools is - along with several other software products similar in nature - an internationally popular program for the work based on corpus-linguistic methodology. It is used by investigators in assorted fields as can be seen in the list below of works using the software.

Papers which use WordSmith

lists many articles, books, chapters which have used WordSmith.

Comparing corpora with WordSmith tools: how large must the reference corpus be?
Tony Berber-Sardinha Proceedings WCC '00 Proceedings of the workshop on Comparing corpora - Volume 9 Pages 7–13
Teacher Training Curriculum Policies in Brazil: Possibilities of Wordsmith Tools
Craveiro, Clarissa & Aguiar, Felipe (2016). Teacher Training Curriculum Policies in Brazil: Possibilities of Wordsmith Tools. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 13(2)
Wang, Shih-Ping, and Khunkhenova Tatiana. "CORPUS RESEARCH ON HEDGES IN LINGUISTICS AND EFL JOURNAL PAPERS." International Journal of Education 9.1 (2017): 45-52.
Wang, Shih-Ping, and Khunkhenova Tatiana. "CORPUS RESEARCH ON HEDGES IN LINGUISTICS AND EFL JOURNAL PAPERS." International Journal of Education 9.1 (2017): 45-52.

References

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External links

Language Learning & Technology Vol. 5, No. 3, May 2001, pp. 32–36 Corpus linguistics Natural language processing toolkits