MonoConc Pro is widely used for teaching and research. The program has a well-designed user interface that allows novice users to load a text or corpus and start analysing language patterns with ease, and yet provides expert users with the powerful and configurable commands needed to work with large, complex, annotated texts.

A corpus or text can be searched very quickly and easily. By choosing the basic Search command, the user can retrieve all examples of a word or phrase (or part of a word) from the corpus (one or more text files). Below, the search term speak has been entered. All instances of speak will be collected from the text-only files comprising the loaded corpus.

More complex search commands are also available when necessary, as the screen shot below reveals. Some of the possible search options are: Text search, Regular expression search, Tag (part-of-speech) search, Batch search, and various heading-sensitive and context-sensitive searches.

The retrieved examples of the search term are typically displayed in a Keyword in Context format such that if the lines are sorted, patterns in the data can very easily be identified visually. (Once unwanted examples have been deleted, the results can be displayed and saved in a sentence format, with accompanying source file information if required.) Above the results window is a context window (reduced in size in the screen shot below). This context window provides up to 30K of context for each "hit." Various kinds of information relating to the results are displayed in the lower panels of this window.

Various frequency calculations can be performed, including collocate frequency, collocation frequency, as well as word frequency for the entire corpus (in frequency order or alphabetical order).

MonoConc Pro will work with any size of corpus and with different languages. Various features of the software make it easy to work with both mark-up and part-of-speech tags.

Single user: $85 (Includes paperback manual, program disk and sample corpus disk.)

Site licence: $550 (2-year licence for up to 15 users)

The Corpus of Spoken Professional American English includes transcripts of conversations of various types occurring between 1994 and 1998. The corpus consists primarily of short interchanges by approximately 400 speakers that are centred on professional activities broadly tied to academics and politics, including academic politics. The seventeen files comprising the corpus contain over 2 million words. For comparison the Brown Corpus and LOB Corpus, popular corpora from the sixties, each contain around 1 million words.

The corpus, which has been constructed from a selection of existing transcripts of interactions in professional settings, contains two sub-corpora of a million words each. One sub-corpus consists mainly of academic discussions such as faculty council meetings and committee meetings related to testing. The second sub-corpus contains transcripts of White House press conferences and is almost exclusively question-and-answer sessions. The corpus is suitable for lexical and grammatical investigations of spoken usage, but not for close discourse analysis since backchannel, overlap and pause length information is not available in the corpus.

Both tagged and untagged files are included in the corpus. The Part-of-Speech tags are similar to those used in the British National Corpus (BNC). MonoConc Pro will allow the tags to be suppressed for easier analysis once a search has been performed.

CSPAE is available for $79 ($295 for a site licence for up to 15 users.) The untagged version of the corpus is $49. ($179 for the site licence.)

MonoConc Pro 2.2
Concordance/Text analysis software. Requirements: Windows 95/XP/Vista etc. $85 (Educational price) ($550 2-year Site Licence)

Concordance/Text Analysis software suitable for use by language learners and casual users. Requirements: Windows 3.x/95/98/2000/NT; Disk space: 1MB; RAM: 16MB. 1999. $69 ($425 2-year Site Licence)

Learning with Corpora
Contains articles by a variety of authors on the use of corpora in linguistic research, language teaching and translation studies. Edited by Guy Aston. 2001. $24.95

Concordances in the Classroom
Using concrete examples, the authors Chris Tribble and Glyn Jones show how a concordancer can be used to significantly enrich language and literature classes. 1997. $21.95

Corpus of Spoken Professional American English
The basic, tagged version includes both tagged and untagged files. 2000. $79 ($295 Site licence). Untagged version. $49 (Site Licence $179)

Concordance pack I
MonoConc 1.5, Corpus (CSPAE – untagged files), and Concordances in the Classroom by Tribble & Jones. $129

Concordance pack II
MonoConc Pro 2.0, Corpus (CSPAE – both tagged and untagged files) and Learning with Corpora Edited by Guy Aston. $159

*Site licence price (2-year licence for up to 15 users)

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