Forth Posting : Beyond Concordance Lines : Using Concordance To Investigate Language Development

This is my forth posting which is about Beyond Concordance Lines. Before I started to do my blogging about this topic, I have read the article about Beyond Concordance Lines : Using Concordance To Investigate Language Learning from the OTL book by Arshad Abdul Samad. Before this I really can’t what is concordance really means, but after I have read the article I can understand what concordance is really about. In my I understanding, concordance means to bring together which means to concord a passage of text which shows the use of a word. Concordance searches the instances of word or phrase and come up with each cases of it. An index in the back of a book will show words in alphabetical order but the concordance shows each instance of each word together in the context from which it came.

One of the application of concordance is applied in literary work and linguistic studies. Concordance is really useful when studying a piece of literature studies because it uses the term of particular words, phrase or theme. It shows us how often a work occurs in any text most probably will be in a poem. If the word did not occurs, it will be useful for one to build up some ideas of a different theme that can be used in a poem and how to relate it to the other poems. If any questions about the theme or any words in the poem and their place in the poem, it will be easy to understand by looking through the concordance.

In the other hand, in the computer concordances, you only need to click the alphabet letter (A-Z). After you have click the letter, you will see a list of words will come out. For example, you click an alphabet L and all the words that begins with the alphabet L will come. Now, what you need to do is just choose the right words that you are searching for and click on it. Here, you can find all the occurrences of the words in poems in question forms. Some of the examples of websites that one can view to get a better understanding of concordance which has been applied in literary and linguistic studies most probably in a poem are http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/shelley/framconc.htm, http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/mariner/framconc.htm, http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/keats/framconc.htm, and http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/blake/framconc.htm.

In conclusion, concordance is litter bit like a computer because it can find things for you. The advantage of concordance is the speed and the fact the concordance will find all words, not necessarily possible in textual concordance.