Using Quick Query
and Browsing Corpus Files

If you are not logged on to BNCweb, log on now.

Select Quick Query. This is like the Concord program in WordSmith.

Now choose a word -- any word -- and type it in the box. (If you really can't think of a single word choose anything on this page, except the, in or of). Then click on [Start query].

You will get a page of hits. Note down the word's frequency, and its frequency per million words.

Note: in corpus linguistics, "matches", "hits", "solutions", "instances", "occurrences" are all different names for frequency!

Try browsing through your concordance, taking a quick look at the examples as you go down.

Since you only get 50 hits per page, click on these arrow buttons to go to the next page, to the last page, and back to the start page. (You can work out for yourself which button is which!)

Now let's get more information about specific concordance lines.

Click on one of the lines in the "Filename" column. What kind of information does this tell you?

Click "Back" at the top of the window to return to the concordance.

Click on any example of your search word in the main concordance window: what happens?

Now browse through the file using the arrow buttons:

When you've finished browsing, click the button next to the arrow buttons, till it reveals "Back to BNC query result". Then press "Go!"