Size 53.43MB | ||
Developer(s) Mike Scott, Oxford University Press Initial release 1996; 21 years ago (1996) Stable release 7.0.0.100 / April 28, 2016; 11 months ago (2016-04-28) Operating system Type Concordancer, Corpus manager | ||
WordSmith Tools (shortened to WordSmith, which means 'word' and 'creator') is a paid software package primarily for linguists, in particular for work in the field of corpus linguistics. It is a collection of modules for searching patterns in a language. The software handles many languages.
Contents
Development and acquisition
The program package was developed by the British linguist Mike Scott at the University of Liverpool and released as version 1.0 in 1996. It was based on MicroConcord co-developed by Mike Scott and Tim Johns, published by Oxford University Press in 1993. Versions 1.0 through 4.0 were sold exclusively by Oxford University Press, the current version 7.0 and previous versions are now also distributed by Lexical Analysis Software Limited. The software runs under Windows. WordSmith is a downloaded-only product which is registered by entering a code costing 50 pounds sterling single user license.
Functionality and applications
The core areas of the software package includes three modules:
Each of the modules is offering a number of features available to certain other features of the analyzed text corpus. Thus, for example, collocation s given to the searched word forms, i.e. a collection (supplemented with a number of additional information) of those words created that occur together with the search word. In addition to this core offer are a number of additional modules that are useful for the preparation and reproduction of the text corpus. WordSmith Tools can be used in 80 different languages. WordSmith Tools is - along with several other software products similar in nature - an internationally popular program for the work based on corpus-linguistic methodology. Can be used in this type of software not only in the Theoretical linguistics, but also for example in the text linguistics media linguistics and discourse analysis, but also in some other, adjacent disciplines of linguistics. Such software is used, for example, to answer questions of use of certain words in certain syntactic structures, or the determination of content or meaning of certain expressions in certain texts or text places. This, among other things, certain patterns can be found in texts.