[Anastasios Asimakopoulos]

Here, you can ask any technical questions you might have about the function we focussed on, Corpus Query Language (CQL). We can clarify things from the guides and/or the practical tasks e.g. if you got different results, couldn’t perform the search, need help to understand your CQL, etc. We can also answer any questions that arose during any other searches you might have performed on your own for practice.

[Vera Duncanson]

Hi Anastasios,

I was playing with the CQL sequences and forgot to use the dot, e.g.

[tag=”R*”][tag=”JJR*”][word=”than”] instead of [tag=”R.*”][tag=”JJR.*”][word=”than”].

It still worked, but I noticed there were slight differences between the two. How does the dot/no dot after a tag change the result?

Thanks,

Vera

 

[Anastasios Asimakopoulos]

Hi @vera-t

Very good question! I actually didn’t know it works without the dot. I usually put both because in other corpora the tags don’t work without both the dot and the asterisk.

Now, what I discovered though is that not adding the dot gives much  fewer results:

[tag=”R.*”]  gave me 335,222 hits

[tag=”R*”]  gave me 203,447 hits

Is it a matter of quantity just? No, I examined the Frequency to see what “sub-tags” each search includes:

[tag=”R.*”] gives us a wider variety of adverb types e.g. RL (locative adverb), RG (degree adverbs),  – see link

[tag=”R*”] gives us only RR (general adverbs) and RRR (comparative adverbs) – see link

So, I am assuming this would be the case for other searches without the dot – N.* will give you more types of nouns as opposed to N*

I hope this helps.

 

[Vera Duncanson]

Thanks Anastasios! Interesting how one little dot can give you a wider range of options

[Samuel Pealing]

This was really fun, and just from the guide alone, I have a bank of 10+ queries that I can run. I can see this being very useful in looking for language structures in specific disciplines.

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