Once you have decided on a linguistic variable to study and have a good idea how you will circumscribe it, the next step is to begin the extraction phase.

DATA EXTRACTION

Data extraction refers to the process and procedures involved in sifting through your data in order to find and select the relevant tokens, i.e. each and every instance of each variant within the context of variation (Chapter 5), and place each token into a data file. A number of procedures have evolved over the years which greatly facilitate the extraction process. To be very practical about exactly how this is done, I will make use of the data shown earlier in Chapter 5, example (12). Suppose we were to extract the tokens of variable (ing) from this material; the data could be listed as in (1) with the word containing the variable along with some of the context in which it occurred displayed in each line. I have found that putting the word containing the variable in capital letters makes it easier to see what is going on in the data.