By default Concord allows you to see the nearest tag in one of the columns of the concordance window. It automatically processes the tag immediately to the left of your search-word, even if you haven't loaded up a tag file.
The point of it…
The advantage is that you can see how your concordance search-word relates to marked-up text.
Here we see that in 2 cases the word chat is marked up as a singular noun. In the 3rd case the POS mark-up was unsure whether chat was a verb or a noun. If the speaker meant have a quick chat it's a noun but maybe the speaker meant someone else should chat about something.
If you've tagged all the speech by Robert as [Rob] and Mary as [Mary], you can quickly see in any concordance involving conversation between Mary, Robert and others, which ones came from each of them.
Alternatively, you might mark up your text as <Introduction>, <Body> and <Conclusion>: Nearest Tag will show each line like this:
1 ... could not give me the time ... <Introduction>
2 ... Rosemary, give me another ... <Body>
3 ... wanted to give her the help ... <Body>
4 ... would not give much for that ... <Conclusion>
To mark up text like this, make up a tag file with your sections and label them as sections, as in these examples:
<ABSTRACT> /description "section"
</ABSTRACT>
<INTRODUCTION> /description "section"
</INTRODUCTION>
<SECTION 1> /description "section"
</SECTION 1>
or, if you want to identify the speech of all characters in a play, and have a list of the characters, and they are marked up appropriately in the text file, something like this:
<Romeo> /description "section"
</Romeo>
<Mercutio> /description "section"
</Mercutio>
<Benvolio> /description "section"
</Benvolio>
In cases using "section", Nearest Tag will find the section, however remote in the text file it may be. Without the keyword "section", Nearest Tag shows only the current context within the span of text saved with each concordance line.
You can sort on the nearest tags.
See also: Guide to handling the BNC, Overview of Tags, Handling Tags, Making a Tag File, Types of Tag, Viewing the Tags, Using Tags as Text Selectors, Tag colours
