QUESTION MARKS AND CONTRACTIONS

[Emmanuel Kyei]

I would be grateful if you could help me with how to use Antconc to search for question mark (?) and contractions ('). 

[Stéphane Carsenty]

Hi Emmanuel,

The question mark is a metacharacter (=a character which has a special function in queries):

" Twelve characters have special meanings in regular expressions: the backslash \, the caret ^, the dollar sign $, the period or dot ., the vertical bar or pipe symbol |, the question mark ?, the asterisk or star *, the plus sign +, the opening parenthesis (, the closing parenthesis ), the opening square bracket [, and the opening curly brace {. These special characters are often called “metacharacters”. Most of them are errors when used alone." (https://www.regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html)

==> To search for a question mark as a litteral, you have to enter it preceded by a backslash, in order to "escape" the metacharacter function.

As for the apostrophe used in contractions, it is a normal character and you should be able to search for it by simply entering it in the search field.

Best,

Stéphane