Last week, my friends and I was in a 20-minute discussion pertaining to the occurrences and uses of concordance; a program that looks into each word class in detail and lists in-sequential alphabets as a whole. The concordance dialogue was with regards to the occurrences of article ‘a’, prepositions ‘about’ and ‘above’, noun- ‘absence’ and ‘Adam’. 

In summary, the occurrences of the article ‘a’ are of three-pronged. First one is its position in a noun phrase, adverbial phrase and adverbial clause. The article ‘a’ is found to occur before any other pre and post- modifier of a noun phrase or simply put, these words occur in attributive position of a noun phrase. Such examples include ‘a pang of agony’, ‘a word of blame’, ‘a dreary winter’, and ‘a’ occurrences in adverbial phrases and clauses are witnessed in ‘in a drowsy tone’, ‘for a minute or two’, ‘at a pretty quick pace’, ‘with a blow’, ‘in a strange kind of vivid dream’.  Not only do the positions in noun phrases are recognized, but the use of ‘a’ is observed occurring prior to words which have been word-class inversed. This inversion includes the transformation of verbs to nouns. This can be illustrated in the noun phrases- ‘a look’, ‘a blow’, ‘a shot’, ‘a cry’, and ‘a fall’. Third, the group revealed the functions of ‘a’ in noun phrases, adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses in some of the complete sentences analysed. In the noun phrases in which ‘a’ contains, the article ‘a’ acts as a subject complement (‘I suppose I was a clever lad’ and ‘I sat at a pretty quick pace’), object (‘I plucked up a brave heart’), adverbials of manner in adverbial phrases and clauses (‘I could not reply for a minute or two’, ‘I said, in a drowsy tone’, ‘at a pretty quick pace’, and ‘I might greet her with a blow’).  

Other than that, the functions of prepositions ‘about’ can be twofold. Firstly, the prepositions are used to denote ‘on the topic of subject of’. Such examples are ‘who told me all this about my poor mother’, ‘did not often think about him’, ‘many voices about me’. Secondly, the prepositions are added to the phrasal verbs functioning as adverbs, and they can be seen in ‘I tried to move about’, ‘feared that, in moving about…’, ‘when all were running about in wild alarm’. Third, they are used to refer to ‘approximately’ or ‘not exactly’ and they are ‘When I was about sixteen’, ‘by the road, but only about four’, and ‘an errand to a place about seven miles’.  The function of ‘above’ is to denote ‘higher on a scale of measuring’. Such instances include ‘not above half-an-hour’s walk from…’, ‘might not be above his comprehension’. 

In the samples included, ‘absence’ acts as a noun and adjective while ‘Adam’ act as nouns respectively. As for ‘absence’, ‘by my prolonged absence’, ‘absence’ is a noun and the phrase ‘looking absent and moody’- absent functions as adjective. In the case of ‘Adam’, they all function as nouns, to refer to a person and act as Object. 

Thus, the extensive use of concordance, as from the ‘Online Teaching and Learning’ book states that concordance has been widely applauded for forms of dictionaries and teaching materials. Such examples of concordance programs include Wordsmith, MonoConc Pro and Microconcord. They are also utilized to explain how words and grammatical are constructed and to analyse language as systematic and dramatic, not just a boring and monotonous rule to follow. In the study reported, the use of concordance can widen language productivity and bombastic vocabulary use.