For this exercise it is best to use a corpus where you know the size of the texts, such as the LOB Corpus. Use the Exact Match if you are interested in a particular form. Submit the search View the hits. The various subcorpora you have searched are displayed on the page, and you can see how often your word occurs in the different subcorpora. It is important to remember that the subcorpora are of different size.
Discussion There can be many explanations to why an item occurs more, or less, in particular texts.
It may not always be possible to give a single explanation, but it is not always necessary to do that either. What is important is to be aware what may cause this variation and take that into consideration when analysing the search results. Often the categories are interrelated - texts about a particular topic can belong to the same genre and be written by the same author, etc. The intention with this list is to point at some things you may want to investigate to find out more about how the use of various words varies between different kinds of texts. Possible explanations to variation in distribution content the content of the text is such that particular words occur more.