text type

/in /by

[We follow Biber (1989) in using text type as a generic term for the many ways in which a text might be classified.]

A text type refers to values assigned to structures (e.g. documents, paragraphs, sentences or others) inside a corpus. Text types can refer to the source (newspaper, book, etc.), medium (spoken, written), time (year, century), or any other type of information about the text.

Text types are sometimes called metadata or header information. Not all corpora have documents annotated for text types. Corpora can be divided into subcorpora based on text types and searches and other analysis can be performed only on texts belonging to the selected text type.

To limit the analysis to only certain text types, use the text type selector.

Displaying text types with a notable presence of a specific collocation in Word Sketches

In Word Sketches, it is possible to display text types each collocation is specific to, if WSTTATTRS is set up​. This can be done in view option → show text types. The maximum number of various text types to be displayed can be set up as well. There are three labels that correspond to the following conditions:

  • only in – if more than 97% of the occurrences appear in this text type;
  • usually in – if more than 70% of the occurrences appear in this text type;
  • concentrated in – if the collocation is represented very densely (= the relative frequency is high) in this text type. This was formerly called especially.

The aforementioned conditions apply only if the specific text type is not a dominant one (i.e. it covers less than 50 % of the corpus).

Read this paper for detailed information

Conventions for inserting metadata manually

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