Keyness Analysis
Keyness analysis identifies the words that are characteristically frequent (or infrequent) in a target corpus relative to a reference corpus, using statistical tests to measure how unexpected each word's frequency is. Introduced by Mike Scott in 1997, it answers the question 'what is this text or collection distinctively about?' and is a central technique in corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis for surfacing the salient vocabulary of a genre, period, author, or social group.
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Sources
- Scott, M. (1997). PC analysis of key words — and key key words. System, 25(2), 233–245. DOI: 10.1016/S0346-251X(97)00011-0 ↗
- Baker, P. (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. Continuum. ISBN: 9780826477248
- Gabrielatos, C. (2018). Keyness analysis: Nature, metrics and techniques. In C. Taylor & A. Marchi (Eds.), Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review (pp. 225–258). Routledge. ISBN: 9781138895157
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Keyword and Keyness Analysis in Corpus Linguistics. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/linguistics/keyness-analysis
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Collocation AnalysisText mining↔ compare
- Corpus Concordance AnalysisLinguistics↔ compare
- Critical Discourse AnalysisQualitative↔ compare