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Corpora and search
A corpus is a selected and edited collection, not every word ever written in a language. Search can reveal patterns and counterexamples only when you know what its tokens, spellings, dates and damage flags represent.
Corpora and search
The collection
A corpus is a collection assembled for a purpose. Its contents depend on what survived, what has been excavated, what editors published and what has been encoded. DCCLT focuses on lexical texts; its frequencies cannot be treated as a frequency profile of all Mesopotamian speech. Record the collection’s scope, version, periods and genres before drawing a general conclusion from it.
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A reading check
Worked question
Your corpus search finds zero examples of a predicted form. What can you conclude?
Show the analysis
Only that the chosen query found none in the corpus and layer searched. Check alternate spelling, lemmatization, damaged text, genre and date coverage before arguing the form never existed.