Table of Contents

1.     Introduction

What is Cobuild?

What is a corpus?

What is a concordancer?

What is a concordance?

A caveat for a corpus

A caveat for a sampler

Non-native students learning English

One last caveat

2.     Getting started: find a word

Search One

Search Two

Search Three

Search Four

Search Five

Search Six

Search Seven

Search Eight

Search Nine

3.     Searching for lemmas and word families

The traditional hierarchy of morphology

Lemma

Word Family

4.     Parts of Speech searches

Table of POS tags

Refining your searches

5.     More than one word

Discontinuous groups

Honing in

Alternative search items

Training in combining queries

Alternatives to POS tags

Apostrophes

6.     Searching for patterns

Take AIM as an example.

Grammar patterns

Active voice: how active?

Curious and Curiouser

Colligation

Articles – using DT in queries

Right and Wrong

Correct?

7.     Language varieties

Spoken and Written Language

UK and US English

Exploiting the varieties function

8.     Collocation

First collocations search

T-score and MI score

Further refining your collocations searches

Collocations and synonyms

Collocations and polysemy

Collocations and connotation

Other Searches

Further Reading

9.     Searching for Answers: you have to have a question

Interpreting results

False friends

Practice makes perfect

10.   Further study

Some Resources

The End