The basic idea of the table is that we want to see how frequent a
collocate is with two competing words, compared to the overall
frequency of those two words. For example, if there are twice as
many tokens of Word1 as Word2 in the corpus overall, but a given
collocate occurs fifty times as much with Word1 as with Word2, then
the ratio of Word1 to Word2 with that collocate is 25 times what
would otherwise "be expected".
1.
2.
The two words being compared
3. 4.
The ratio (overall) for the two words. In this
example, there are only .31 tokens of utter for every token
of sheer (2,483 vs 8,002), but 3.19 tokens of sheer
for every token of utter.
5.
The rank-ordered list of words or phrases that occur with [1].
Click on the word or phrase to see the "Keyword in Context" display.
6.
The frequency of [5] with [1]. In this case we looked for nouns
after utter, so this indicates that there were 50 tokens of
utter disbelief (the last entry on the left).
7.
The frequency of [5] with the competing word [2]. In this case, it
shows that there are just 3 cases of sheer disbelief.
8.
The ratio of [6] / [7]. In this case, there are 16.7 times as many
cases of utter disbelief as there are sheer disbelief
(When the competing word has a frequency of 0, it is set to .5, to
avoid division by 0.)
9.
The ratio of [8] to [3]. In the case of disbelief, the ratio of
[utter/sheer] (16.7 times as frequent) is
53.2 times the overall ratio of [utter vs sheer] (.31) in the corpus.
The results are sorted by the decreasing figures in this column.
Note that in the example above, the entries are sorted by the
"score", which is a function of the ratio of the two
words. But if you just want to see which are the most frequent
strings with each word (regardless of what is happening with the
other word), then select OPTIONS / [SORT BY] = [FREQUENCY] in the
search form.
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