How to locate "harmonic combinations" in WordSmith

[fuyanger]

Modals tend to cluster in harmonic combinations (Halliday 1970). But I am puzzled how to locate these combinations using WST after tagging. The word suggest occurs often with may as exemplified in the following:

It has been suggested<MV1> ... that the affects of light on PEPc may <MV2>be mediated by a Calvin cycle product....

After tagging the word suggest in the main clause and may in the subordinate clause, how can I find out these harmonic combinations since it is often hard to know how many words apart these modals are from each other.

Are there any easier ways to solve this problem than simply checking sentence by sentence?

 

[xiaoz]

You can actually use Advanced Search in WST4 to search for items spaced up to 25 tokens. But post-editing of concordance lines is required to remove mismatches.

Other tools such as Xaira and MonoConc Pro can also do such searches - more importantly for homonic items within the same sentence.

 

[xujiajin]

In CLEC's tagging scheme, they used "-" plus a numeral to indicate the position of the error, for example, [vp3, 4-]. Likewise, you can mark up the distance between the target word and the preceding harmonic collocate or antecedent, since your annotation is done manually.

 

[fuyanger]

Thanks for your help, Dr Xiao and Xu. I will have a try.