n-gram

is a sequence of items (bigram = 2 items , trigram = 3 items ...n-gram = n items). An item can refer to anything (letter, digit, syllable, token, word or others) . In the context of corpora and corpus linguistics, n-grams typically refer to tokens (or words). In linguistics, n-grams are sometimes referred to as MWEs, i.e. multiword expressions. Generating a list of the most frequent n-grams will help us linguistic phenomena that might go unnoticed when using other tools. N-grams can identify discourse markers or chunks of language which should be taught/learnt as fixed phrases in language teaching. The tool to generate ngrams is the N-gram tool in Sketch Engine.