Keywords are the words that are used to reveal the internal structure of an author's reasoning. While they are used primarily for rhetoric, they are also used in a strictly grammatical sense for structural composition, reasoning, and comprehension. Indeed, they are an essential part of any language.
There are many different types of keyword categories including: Conclusion, Continuation, Contrast, Emphasis, Evidence, Illustration and Sequence. Each category serves its own function, as do the keywords inside of a given category.
Contents |
English Keywords
| Type | Signals | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Conclusion or Causality | a summation of information | therefore; thus; in conclusion; believes; so; consequently; it can be seen that; can conclude that; claims that; all in all; |
| Continuation | more support for the same claim is coming up | and; also; moreover; furthermore; plus; in addition; at the same time; as well as; equally;besides; what is more; both...and; equally important; not only...but also |
| Contrast (linguistics) | a comparison of similarities and differences | but; despite; yet; however; alternatively; still; although; unless; otherwise; not; though; while; nevertheless; by contrast; notwithstanding; rather; conversely; in spite of; on the other hand; contrarily |
| what is considered important | I think; above all; essentially; clearly; most of all; especially; primarily; particularly; in large measure; indeed; | |
| Evidence | an upcoming background | because; for; since; the reason is that; |
| Illustration/Exemplification | that an example is being given as support for a claim. | for example; for instance; specifically; to illustrate; such as; In the words of; To "name"; For "name"; According to "name"; as "name" says,; |
| Sequence | that there is a structure or order that has been formulated in the writing | Firstly,...,Secondly,...Thirdly,...Lastly; Next; Finally; On the one hand; Recently; |
Corpus Linguistic Key Words
In corpus linguistics, key words can be identified as words which appear with statistically unusual frequency in a text or a corpus of texts; as such they are identified by software by comparing a word-list of the text in question with a word-list based on a larger reference corpus. A suitable term for the phenomenon is keyness. The procedure used for example by WordSmith in order to list key words/phrases and plot where they appear in texts. These items are very often of interest, particularly interesting are those which human readers would be unlikely to notice such as prepositions, time adverbs and pronouns.
See also: Scott, M. & Tribble, C., 2006, Textual Patterns: keyword and corpus analysis in language education, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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