Using
Computers
in
Linguistics:
A Practical Guide

Chapter 6

Software
for Doing
Field Linguistics

Evan Antworth
Summer Institute of Linguistics

J. Randolph Valentine
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Online Appendix:
Text Analysis


Data Management


Speech Analysis and Phonetics


Phonology and Morphology


Syntax and Grammar Description


Lexicon


Text Analysis


Language Survey and Comparison

Text Analysis

Under the general rubric of text analysis falls several types of programs. IT and Shoebox are tools for producing annotated interlinear text. Many programs for searching text and producing concordances and word lists are available, such as Concordance, Micro-OCP, MonoConc, TA, and TACT for DOS/Windows and Conc and Concorder for Macintosh.

Conc

Concordance program for the Macintosh specially designed for linguistic analysis. Produces keyword-in-context (KWIC) concordances of texts. The sorting order is defined by the user.

Concordance

An entirely new program for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95/98 which makes wordlists, concordances, and Web Concordances from your electronic texts.

Concorder

Concorderis a Macintosh software package for the creation, editing, sorting and printing of concordances. A French version is also available.

  • Systems supported: Macintosh
  • Current version: 3
  • Developer: D. W. Rand
  • Distributor: Les Publications CRM, C.P. 6128, succ. centre-ville, MontrČal, Qc, H3C 3J7 Canada, tel. (514) 343-7501, fax (514) 343-2254, e-mail sales@CRM.UMontreal.CA
  • Price: CDN$93.46 (plus 7% GST for Canadian orders) plus shipping
  • URL: http://www.crm.umontreal.ca/~rand/Concorder.html

IT (Interlinear Text processor)

Produces annotated interlinear texts. Maintains the vertical alignment of the interlinear annotations and stores all word and morpheme annotations in a lexical database, thus enabling semi-automatic glossing. IT exists in two different versions:

DOS

  • Current version: 1.2
  • Developer: Gary F. Simons and Larry Versaw, Summer Institute of Linguistics
  • Distributor: International Academic Bookstore, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX, USA, tel. (972) 708-7404, fax (972) 708-7363.
  • Price: $60.00 for software and documentation; software free if downloaded from the URLs below
  • Documentation: Simons, Gary F. and Larry Versaw. 1992. How to Use IT: a Guide to Interlinear Text Processing. 3rd ed. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
  • Reviews:
    1. "Interlinear Text Processing, Part 1: IT", Newsletter of The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the America, 7(4):17-18.
    2. Lancashire, Ian (ed.). 1992. The Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989-90, 158-159. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • URLs:
    gopher://gopher.sil.org/11/gopher_root/computing/software/linguistics/text_analysis/it/
    ftp://ftp.sil.org/software/dos/it12.zip
    http://www.sil.org/ftp/software/dos/it12.zip

Macintosh

ITF (Interlinear Text Formatter)

Formats interlinear texts for publication (as for producing a monograph of annotated texts). Based on the TeX typesetting language (Knuth 1986), ITF works with interlinear text produced by IT and Shoebox.

  • Systems supported: DOS, UNIX, Macintosh. Requires TeX.
  • Current version: 1.1
  • Developer: Jonathan Kew and Stephen McConnel, Summer Institute of Linguistics
  • Distributor: International Academic Bookstore, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX, USA, tel. (972) 708-7404, fax (972) 708-7363.
  • Price: $14.00
  • Documentation: Kew, Jonathan and Stephen McConnel. 1990. Formatting Interlinear Text. Occasional Publications in Academic Computing 17. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Micro-OCP

A batch-oriented concordance program for DOS based on the mainframe version of the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP). Produces word lists, indexes, KWIC concordances, and vocabulary statistics.

  • Systems supported: DOS
  • Developer: Oxford University Computing Service
  • Distributor: Oxford University Press
  • Price: UK price: £175
  • Reviews:
    1. Jones, Randall L. 1989. "Micro-OCP", Computers and the Humanities 23.2:131-135.
    2. Hughes, John J. 1988. "Micro-OCP: mainframe power in a microcomputer text analysis program", Bits and Bytes Review 2.1:13-18.
    3. Hockey, S. and J. Martin. 1987. "The Oxford Concordance Program Version 2", Literary and Linguistic Computing 2.2:125-131.
    4. Lancashire, Ian (ed.). 1992. The Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989-90, 486-488. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • URLs:
    http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/resguide/resources/o125.html
    http://www1.oup.co.uk/bin/readcat?subject=EP+%2D+Humanities

MonoConc

An interactive concordance program for Windows. It supports loading multiple files, word and phrase searching with wildcard characters, and frequency counts.

  • Systems supported: Windows 3 and Windows 95
  • Current version: 1.5
  • Distributor: Athelstan, 2476 Bolsover, Suite 464, Houston TX 77005, U.S.A. 800-598-3880 (U.S. only), 713-523-2837, Fax: 713-523-6543.
  • Price: $79
  • URL: http://www.athel.com/mono.html

TA

A set of DOS programs that perform basic text manipulation tasks including generate word lists from text, automate word segmenting in texts, generate concordances of texts, sort, filter, and format lexical files, and make reversals of lexical files.

TACT

Interactive DOS program for doing full-text retrieval, concordancing, and content analysis. Can produce a word list with frequencies, a one-line KWIC concordance, a KWIC concordance that shows several lines, distribution graphs, and collocations.

  • Systems supported: DOS
  • Current version: 2.1
  • Developers: John Bradley, Ian Lancashire, Lidio Presutti, and Michael Stairs
  • Price: Software: free if downloaded from URL below, manual: $50
  • Review: Lancashire, Ian (ed.). 1992. The Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989-90, 495-496. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Documentation: Using TACT with Electronic Texts. New York: MLA, September 1996. MLA Software for Students and Scholars 2. xiv & 361 pp. with Glossary, Index, CD-ROM. Paperback ISBN 0-87352-569-8, US $50.
    Order from: Modern Language Association, Customer Services, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003-6981, tel. (212) 614-6382 fax (212) 477-9863 or (212) 533-0680
  • URL: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/cch/tact.html

Back to Appendix Page | Up to Book Page

This page is part of an online appendix for the book Using Computers in Linguistics: A Practical Guide, edited by John M. Lawler and Helen Aristar Dry (Routledge, 1998).

Last modified: January 27, 1999