Concordanzstellen

Concordanzstellen are the reference points within a concordance that indicate where a specific word, lemma, or phrase occurs in a text. In German-language scholarship the term refers to the individual occurrences listed in a concordance, including the source and the exact location (such as chapter and verse, page, or line) and often the surrounding context. Each concordanzstelle serves as a data point showing how a form is distributed across a text or corpus.

In biblical studies, concordanzstellen list every occurrence of a lemma in the corpus, enabling scholars to study usage, sense, and collocations. For example, a German Bible concordance might record every occurrence of the word for “love” with references like Mt 22:39 or 1 Kor 13:13, illustrating how the term appears in different contexts. In lexicography and corpus linguistics, concordanzstellen underpin evidence for sense distinctions, collocational patterns, and frequency analyses, and they support the annotation and linking of dictionary entries to textual evidence.

With digitization, concordanzstellen can be generated automatically from large text collections and integrated into search interfaces and linguistic databases. This enhances reproducibility and enables quantitative studies of word behavior across genres and periods. Limitations include dealing with inflection, polysemy, and textual variation, which can complicate the automatic extraction and interpretation of concordanzstellen. Related terms include Konkordanz and Konkordanzstelle, as well as broader areas such as corpus linguistics and lexicography.