Inquiry about the expansion of contracted forms

[N AG]

Hello sir,

I have a question. Is it allowed or not to expand contracted forms in spoken data like ain't, 'cause to avoid confusion? If it is not allowed then where can I see all of the contracted forms of one grammatical item in one click in antconc.

The second question is kindly guide me how to generte a word loud on antconc 4.2.4 versoin.

Thanks. Stay blessed. 

Nadia.

[Laurence Anthony]

Hi Nadia,

Whether you expand contracted forms depends on the purpose of your
analysis. AntConc does not require you to expand them. In most cases,
I would recommend keeping the original transcription unchanged. If you
decide to normalize forms such as “ain’t” or “’cause”, you should
document the changes clearly and ideally keep an unchanged copy of the
original data.

AntConc does not automatically expand or group every contracted form
under a single grammatical item. If you want to count several forms
together, you can search for them using a regular expression, or
create a normalized version of the corpus before loading it into
AntConc.

To create a word cloud in AntConc 4.2.4, open the Word Cloud tool,
choose the settings you want, and click Start. The cloud is generated
from the words in the scratchpad, but you can also generate results in
the other tools and then choose the output of that tool inside the
Word Cloud tool.

Best regards,

Laurence