Collins Cobuild English Collocations on CD-ROM screen shots

These two screen shots were taken on my Macintosh using Soft Windows 95. The original screen shots were very large (1037 x 797), so have been shrunk so as to fit smaller screens. Consequently, both screen shots will be easier to see if you save them to your hard disk, and then use your own photo software to view them.

1) On starting up the CD-ROM, this is the first screen that the user is faced with. Here the user enters the search word (no phrases) in the left part of the screen. Almost immediately, the user is informed of the frequency of the search word (or node word). If the user wishes to go further she can click on 'Show Collocates' in order to reveal the collocates of her search word. The CD-ROM automatically prevents certain very frequent words from being included in the collocate list. These 'stopwords' can also be viewed. In this screen shot collocates for the word 'draw' are shown (at the bottom-right). We can see that 'attention' is the most frequent collocate of the 'draw', occurring 696 times together . Here I clicked on 'attention' in order to see some example concordances of 'draw' and 'attention' together - see screen shot 2.

2) This screen shot shows 20 concordances of the node 'draw' with its collocate 'attention'. The CD-ROM only produces a maximum of 20 concordances. From here it is possible to copy and paste the concordances to a word processor, or view an expanded context of any one concordance (this can't be copied).