As we cannot be sure of the meaning or the part-of-speech of an item
from a word frequency list, are not n-grams a sort of halfway house
between word frequency lists and concordances?
To me, n-grams is just one of the tools in the corpus linguistics toolbag,
although it may be a relative newcomer, and hasn't grabbed the headlines
like keywords, perhaps.
If I remember correctly, at Cobuild, we first used bigrams for the BBC
dictionary (published in 1992). I don't think n-grams was a feature of
the earlier versions of WordSmith, and even in the more recent
AntConc, the n-grams option is slightly hidden.
Since the 1990s, I have used n-grams as a routine part of corpus
analysis, if they are available in the software I am using at the time,
for a variety of purposes (eg investigating language varieties in 'The
Globalization of Business English?' at Complex 2001; investigating
genre features in 'A corpus-based analysis of junk emails' at LREC
2002; and recently, to compare Business Spanish and Business French
in research for the COMENEGO project).
Access to Google n-grams seems to have sparked interest in studies
into historical changes in social, cultural, and political values?
best
Ramesh
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Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:51:30 +0200 From: Cedric Krummes <cedric.krummes at uni-leipzig.de> Subject: [Corpora-List] Uses of N-grams? To: Corpora at uib.no
Hello,
Regarding n-grams (highly frequent word sequences like "on the other hand" or "why don't you"), does anybody any uses for them apart from language teaching.
Most literature dealing with n-grams seems to apply them to foreign language teaching, second language acquisition, or English for X purposes. Any other uses?
Best wishes,
Cédric Krummes -- Dr. Cédric Krummes
Universität Leipzig ˇ +49-341-97-37404 http://www.cedrickrummes.org/contact.php