WordSmith

WordSmith Tools, in short: Wordsmith (English:, word creator ', to be understood here in the sense of craftsmanship bypassing with words ) is a paid software package primarily for linguists, in particular for work in the field of corpus linguistics. The program includes several modules for the handling and analysis of texts and can be used in many different languages ​​.

Development and acquisition

The program package was developed by the British linguist Mike Scott at the University of Liverpool and released in version 1.0 in 1996. It is based on the model developed by Mike Scott and Tim Johns and 1993 first presented concordance program " Micro Concord ". Versions 1.0 to 4.0 of Wordsmith been sold exclusively by the UK's University of Oxford and the local Oxford University Press, version 5.0, and now also a part of the previous versions are Lexical Analysis Software Ltd.. distributed. The current version of the software can be used until 2000 Windows 7 on a single computer or over a network under the operating system Windows. Under certain conditions, the software also runs on an Apple OS and Linux. Setting up the software on the computer is ultra- easy and without installation program.

Currently, the WordSmith Tools versions 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 are (there are no upgrades with different version numbers ) and the narrower program MicroConcoord available. Is acquired Wordsmith by downloading a self-extracting executable file for the time being as a demo version. This includes all the features of the full version, there are only 25, spent 50 results of a query in the latest program version. The update to the full version by entering a code, just under 60 pounds sterling is awarded excluding VAT for a single user license fee on the online way of instantly ( November 2012 ). There are also multi-user licenses.

Functionality and applications

The core of the software package includes three modules:

• Concord is the creation of concordances, ie all hits of a search term within a predefined text corpus.

• Word List lists all the words or word forms that are included in the selected corpus and outputs various statistics on the text corpus from.

• KeyWord creates a list of all those words or word forms that significantly rarely or frequently occur after certain statistical criteria in the text corpus.

Each of the modules provides a number of features available that demonstrate certain other features of the examined corpus. For example, collocations are given to this word forms, ie a list (supplemented with several other information ) created by those words that occur together with the search word. In addition to this core offer there are a number of additional modules that are useful for the preparation and reproduction of the text corpus. Can be used WordSmith Tools is in 80 different languages.

WordSmith Tools is - in addition to some other software products similar in nature - an internationally popular program for the linguistic work based on korpuslinguistischer methodology. Can be used this type of software, not only in theoretical linguistics, but also example in text linguistics, media linguistics and discourse analysis, but also in some other adjacent linguistics scientific disciplines. Such software is used, for example, to answer questions of the use of certain words in certain syntactic structures or the determination of content or the meaning of certain expressions in certain texts or text types. Characterized, certain patterns can be found in texts among others.