Corpus Linguistic Key Words
In corpus linguistics, key words are words that appear with statistically unusual frequency in a text or a corpus of texts. They are identified by software that compares a word-list of the text with a word-list based on a larger reference corpus. A suitable term for the phenomenon is keyness. The procedure used, for example by WordSmith, to list key words and phrases and plot where they appear in texts. These items are very often of interest—particularly those human readers would not likely notice, such as prepositions, time adverbs, and pronouns.
See also: Scott, M. & Tribbe, C., 2006, Textual Patterns: keyword and corpus analysis in language education, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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—Unknown. Corpus Christi Carol (l. 11–14)
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