1. Why might a phrase like "par for the course" or "I must admit" be difficult for a standard concordancing program?

2. What is "semantic prosody"? Give an example or two.

3. What is a "probe"? How does it relate to "frames" (p. 49)?

4. Elaborate on the idea that "concordance lines present information; they do not interpret it".

5. Comment on the frequency of phrases like "left-handed" vs "right-handed". Does this relate to Chomsky's criticism of frequency in cases like "I live in New York" vs "I live in Dayton, OH"?

6. What are "keywords"? How do we find them?

7. What is collocation? What is a "span"?

8. What are the basic differences between MI-indices and t-scores? (BTW, we'll come back to these type of statistics in a couple of weeks)

9. Run some searches in WordSmith that give you output like that on page 77. What would "column displays" like this be good for?

10. How can concordances be used to give a "profile of the semantic field" of a word?

11. If "fall on deaf ears" has one of the highest MI scores for DEAF, does this relate to the main meaning of DEAF?

Screenshot of WordCruncher collocations