KWIC displays are not the only type of display available. Often, a translator will need to see a larger context, and concordances can be generated that allow browsing by sentence, paragraph, and even the whole text.
In addition to exact-string searching, concordancers typically permit more sophisticated search patterns, allowing functions such as case-sensitive searches (e.g., to distinguish between "Polish" and "polish"); wildcard searches, in which a special character is used to represent one or more characters in a search string (e.g., "print*" to retrieve "print," "printed," "printer," "printing," "prints," etc., or "dis?s" to retrieve both "discs" and "disks"); and searches using Boolean operators (e.g., AND, OR, NOT) or other regular expressions.
Figure 2 A KWIC display of the concordances retrieved for the search pattern "virus."
Another type of search is a context search, in which another term must appear within a user-specified distance of the search pattern (e.g., contexts in which "printer" appears within five words of "cartridge"). Figure 5 shows the results of a wildcard search, while figure 6 displays the results of a context search.
Regardless of the type of search pattern entered, the benefit of using concordance lines as a source of linguistic evidence is that they reveal the context in which individual occurrences of words are found. The options for sorting and displaying the data can facilitate the process of observing and distinguishing patterns of linguistic behaviour.
Figure 3 A KWIC display of the concordances retrieved for the search pattern "virus" sorted in alphabetical order according to the word immediately preceding "virus."
Figure 4 A KWIC display of the concordances retrieved for the search pattern "virus" sorted in alphabetical order according to the word immediately following "virus."
Figure 5 A KWIC display of the concordances retrieved using the wildcard search pattern "virus*."
Figure 6 A KWIC display of the concordances retrieved using a context search in which "drive" must occur within a five-word span of "disk."
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