Web interface: User manual

To search and download the corpus, click on the tab ‘Search/Download’, where you can do a ‘simple search’ or an ‘advanced search’. The web interface has been designed so as to be as simple and intuitive as possible. Next to each search element, you will see a question mark symbol like this . Click on it to get help about how to use each element. Additionally, the search interface is divided into coloured sections to help you visualize the different sections.

SIMPLE SEARCH: Use this to look for a word (or a combination of words in the corpus). The result will be a concordance.

• In the blue area “Corpus to search” you can select the subcorpus to search (learners of Spanish or natives). You can also select the mother tongue (L1) of the learners.
• In the yellow area “Words (optional)”, you can type in the word(s) to search. Click on the question mark symbol for further details. You can optionally leave this search box blank so as to browse the entire corpus.
• In the pink area (page size), select the size of your output, i.e., how many concordance lines you want per page (50, 100 or 150).

ADVANCED SEARCH: Use this to look for words, grammatical categories, lemmas, frequencies, concordances, etc.. You can apply several filters to restrict your search. You can also download the corpus texts here. We recommend you click on the different question marks for additional help.

• In the blue area “Corpus to search”, you can select the subcorpus you are interested in (learners of Spanish or natives). You can also select the mother tongue (L1) of the learners.
• In the pink area “Result (Output)”, select the type of result type you need: concordances, texts, simple frequency and full frequency. You can also select the result subtype (words, grammatical element, proximal words and proximal grammatical elements). You can sort your output by customising it. Finally, you can finally select the size of your output, i.e., the number of concordance lines per page (50, 100 or 150).
• In the pale yellow area “Sensitivity”, you can choose whether your search will be case and accent sensitive or not. Click on the question mark for additional help and examples.
• In the greek area “Filters”, you can filter or narrow down your search according to a series of variables. Click on the question mark symbol for further details. For example, you can filter the output according to: the speakers’ mother tongue (L1), the medium (written or spoken), the learners’ proficiency level(s), their sex, the score the got in the placement test (in %), the proficiency score that they gave themselves (self-assessment), the title of the task or composition, the filename, the age of the speaker, the age at which the learner was exposed to Spanish, the years the learner has been learning Spanish, and the months the learner has stayed in a Spanish-speaking country.
• In the yellow area at the bottom, you will see different options depending on the subresult type you have chosen:
  • “Words”: You can type in the word(s) to search.
  • “Grammatical elements”: You can indicate here the following:
    • Tags: In a drop-down menu, you can select the grammatical word (or part of speech) you are looking for, e.g., a Noun, or an Adjective, or a Verb, etc. You can also select the subtype of Noun or Adjective or Adjective, etc.
    • Lemmas: You can type here if you are looking for a lemma. For example, ESTAR will give you all the forms of the verb ‘estar’: estoy, estás, está, estamos, ... estaré, estarás, ... estaba, estabas, ... estuve, estuviste, ... estaría, estarías, ..., etc.
    • Word proximity: It searches for a first word separated X words from a second word. Example: “yo 1 estoy” = yo estoy; “yo 2 estoy” = yo siempre estoy, yo nunca estoy, yo ahora estoy, ...; “yo 3 estoy” = yo ahora mismo estoy, yo creo que estoy, ..., etc.
    • Grammatical elements proximity: It searches for a first grammatical word separated X words from a second grammatical word.