Corpus Analysis of Key Words
Paul Rayson · The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics · 2022
The key‐words procedure originating in corpus linguistics is extremely widely used for the comparative analysis of language alongside other standard methods such as frequency profiling, concordancing, n‐grams, and collocation. This entry briefly describes the method for creating a contingency table for each word in the joint frequency lists of two corpora, and how to calculate a significance or keyness measure, in order to investigate significant differences between those corpora. The development of the approach and recent research on its limitations and extensions are covered, along with potential applications.