LINGUIST List 5.1492

Tue 20 Dec 1994

FYI: Shareware Mac concordance program available

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1. Michael Barlow, Shareware Mac concordance program available

I am making available a shareware concordance program for the Macintosh
called MonoConc. The program is somewhat slow (about 70 hits a minute),
but it handles the basics. MonoConc works with text-only files and
produces a concordance in a "key word in context" format. The search
term can be a word (or part of a word, e.g. linguist*) or a phrase.

The resulting concordance can be sorted 1R (first right), 1L, 2R, and
2L. The amount of context shown in the concordance lines can be
adjusted, and clicking on a particular concordance line will bring half a
dozen or so lines from the original text into a context window.

In addition, a collocation screen gives the number of occurrences of
all the words occurring in positions 3L, 2L, 1L, 1R, 2R, and 3R. It is
possible to exclude certain words (e.g., function words) from the count.
There is also a simple graphical representation of the main collocates.

The concordance and collocation results can be saved to a file or printed.

I plan to post the program to a couple of ftp sites. (If you are reading
this in January 1995, then you can try ftping to Rice University at
ftp.rice.edu. The program will be in the folder pub or pub\linguistics.
Alternatively, in the new year you can try John Lawler's Linguistics
archive at the University of Michigan.) The program (on a disk) and a
manual can also be purchased from Athelstan (800-598-3880).

For those who would like a copy of the program before Christmas, I can
send a binhex version (about 1400K) via email--assuming I don't get too
many requests.

Michael Barlow

barlowruf.rice.edu