These examples use the program "Conc 1.76." (Other programs work similarly.) After you have opened Conc, you will see a diamond with a key in it in the upper right of your desktop.

Under the File menu in the upper left of your window, open Open .. You can open any file that has been saved in a "text" format. (To do this, open a file, choose "save as..", choose "text", and rename it before you save it. Then you will be able to open it from within the concordance program.)

After you open your file, you will notice that it appears in a box at the top of the screen. (If you choose "9 point" under the Font menu, the type will be smaller and more will fit on each line.) You can "Append" other files to your initial one, to create a longer corpus in which to search. The longer your corpus, the better chance you have of finding examples you want.

Under the Options menu at the top of your window, choose Include words .... You will get an options box like the one shown below.
• GERUNDS/INFINITIVES:

  To practice, we can look for gerunds and infinitives. But we have to tell the concordance program exactly what words we are looking for. To find infinitives, we should ask the program to find all of the to s. In the third box in the options box, below Include words in the following list: type in: to . For infinitives, this one word should be enough.

  To look for gerunds, we need to find many different words, but we know that we are looking only for words that end in -ing. In order to look for PARTS of words, we need to enter them in the first box under ... words that match one of these patterns: To look for words that end with -ing, type a period (.) followed by ing. The period is a "wild card", which stands for "any letters in this position."

• CONDITIONS:

  Let's think about each clause in a condition separately:

  THE IF-CLAUSE: As we know, "if-clauses" or phrases often begin with the following words or phrases: if - unless - provided that - as long as or without
  or otherwise or in that case replacing the entire clause THE MAIN CLAUSE: In real conditions, the main clause looks just like a "normal" sentence. But we will probably find lots of unreal conditions if we look for the following words: would - could - might
  
  In the third box in the options box, below Include words in the following list: type in each of these words (for phrases, choose the most distinctive word to search for ( provided, for example).

Under the Options menu, if you choose Sorting .. you can ask that your examples be sorted according to the words following them ... this can be useful in identifying patterns. (If you don't choose this option, each word will be listed in the order in which it occurs in your text -- which might also be useful.) -- (Other, more sophisticated concordance programs provide more sorting options.)

Again, if you choose "9 point" under the Font menu, the type will be smaller, and more of the context before and after the word will be displayed.

Under the Build menu at the top of the window, choose Word concordance and you will see another box of text appear below the first one. The words you have told the program to look for will be bold and lined up in the middle, with the words before and after them on either side. The bold words will be in alphabetical order, and the examples of the same word will be in the order you have chosen (the order they appear in in the text, or in order according to the word following them.) (Therefore, examples of to will be together near the end of the list, but there will probably be -ing- words before and after them.) (Along the left side will be numbers indicating the LINE numbers in the original text -- these, of course, depend on the total makeup of your "corpus", and on the font in which you have displayed it.)

Notice that if you click on one of the examples in the lower window, the text in which it appears is shown in the window above. This way you can look through all of your examples, and also see the complete context that they come from if necessary.

• You can open a word-processing window and copy and paste examples from your concordance into a wordprocessing document -- and then select examples that fit your purposes (all examples of to, for example, will not be infinitives.), rearrange or reformat the examples, etc.. Here are two on-line examples, but be sure you can print your work before you spend a lot of time on this: conditions * gerunds/infinitives

• You can save the entire document on a disk. (under the File menu.)

• You can print the concordance (also under the File menu.)

(different patterns, displays, the index, statistics, etc.)

Ann Salzmann
Intensive English Institute
University of Illinois