[CWB] Storing results for further search queries

[Stefan Evert]

> Is there a way to save part of results as a variable and then to use it as a new query. For example after doing the following two steps in BNC:
> 
> 1. [hw="nice"] "to" [class="VERB"];
> 2. count  Last  by  hw  on  matchend[0];
> 
> Can I somehow store only the list of words (e.g. as lemma forms) and then take that set as a search query?

That isn't possible, but you can achieve your goal with a bit of help from the Linux command-line.

	A = [hw="nice"] "to" [class="VERB"];
	set PrettyPrint off;  # make output machine readable
	group A matchend hw;   # more efficient than count

You can now use the "cut" command-line utility to extract the list if verb lemmas from the frequency table.  This can be done from within CQP by redirecting output to a pipe:

	group A matchend hw > "| cut -f1 > verbs.txt";

And then read in the wordlist:

	define $verbs < "verbs.txt";	
	B = [hw = $verbs & class = "VERB"]  # find all instances of a verb

If you just want the general lemma frequency, this can be obtained more efficiently with the cwb-lexdecode command-line utility  (but you should probably use the lemma attribute then so you only get the verb readings).

	group A matchend hw > "| cut -f1 | cwb-lexdecode -P hw -f -F - BNC";

Best,
Stefan