18Feb 2017

USING ANTCONC: A CORPUS-BASED TOOL, TO INVESTIGATE AND ANALYSE THE KEYWORDS IN DICKENS’ NOVEL ‘A TALE OF TWO CITIES’.

  • MA English Language and Applied Linguistics (ELAL).
  • Assistant Lecturer at the department of English Language, Cihan University – Sulaimanyah.
Crossref Cited-by Linking logo
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • References
  • Cite This Article as
  • Corresponding Author

Keywords analysis is one of the important methods in corpus linguistics. It has the privilege to analyse texts/corpora in terms of statistical significance, by comparing two or more texts/corpora. This study regarded the keywords that are notable statistically in Dickens’ ‘A tale of two cities’ using Laurence Anthony’s AntConc tools. It aimed to find out a number of keywords of the mentioned Victorian novel (the node) compared with 35 Victorian novels (as a reference corpus). This study briefly shows and discusses a number of keywords of this novel as well as showing the limitations of this method of analysis. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are used; the quantitative analysis is by Laurence Anthony’s AntConc. concordancer whereas the qualitative analysis would be individual. Log-likelihood method, significant keywords as well as a number of negative keywords are selected and analysed.


  1. Baker, P. (2006) Using corpora in discourse analysis, London: Continuum.
  2. Biber, D., Connor, U. and Upton, T. A. (2007) Discourse on the move: using corpus analysis to describe discourse structure, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  3. Groom, N. (2010) Closed-class keywords and corpus-driven discourse analysis, in M. Bondi, and M. Scott, (eds.) Keyness in texts, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  4. Macmillan Dictionaryhttp://www.macmillandictionary.com/.
  5. Mahlberg, M. (2005) English general nouns: a corpus theoretical approach, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  6. Mahlberg, M. (2010) Corpus Linguistics and the Study of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Journal of Victorian Culture, 15(2), pp. 292-298.
  7. Mahlberg, M. (2012) Corpus Analysis of Literary texts: The encyclopaedia of AppliedLinguistics.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0249/full accessedon the 20th of March 2016.
  8. Newlin, G. (1998) Understanding A tale of two cities: a student casebook to issues, sources, and historical documents, United States of America: Greenwood Press.
  9. Rayson, P. (2012) Corpus Analysis of Key Words: The encyclopaedia of AppliedLinguistics.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0247/full accessedon the 20th of March 2016.
  10. Scott, M. and Tribble, C. (2006) Textual patterns: key words and corpus analysis in language education, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  11. Scott, M. (2010) Problems in investigating keyness, or cleaning the undergrowth andmarking out trails, in M. Bondi, and M. Scott, (eds.) Keyness in texts, Amsterdam:John Benjamins.
  12. Stubbs, M. (2010) Three concepts of keyness, in M. Bondi, and M. Scott, (eds.) Keyness in texts, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  13. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. (2005) App.
  14. The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickenshttp://www.gutenberg.org/

[Mustafa Khalid Saleh Al-Rawi. (2017); USING ANTCONC: A CORPUS-BASED TOOL, TO INVESTIGATE AND ANALYSE THE KEYWORDS IN DICKENS’ NOVEL ‘A TALE OF TWO CITIES’. Int. J. of Adv. Res. 5 (Feb). 366-372] (ISSN 2320-5407). www.journalijar.com


Mr. Mustafa Khalid Saleh Al-Rawi
Assistant Lecturer at the department of English Language/ Cihan University – Sulaimanyah – Kurdistan region - Iraq

DOI:


Article DOI: 10.21474/IJAR01/3158      
DOI URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.21474/IJAR01/3158