#! perl -slw
use strict;

my $word = $ARGV[0] or die "No search term";

( my $text = do{ local $/; <DATA> } ) =~ tr[\n][]d;

$text =~ s[
    ( (?: \S+ \s+ ){1,3} )
    ( $word ) [[:punct:]]*
    (?= ( (?: \s+ \S+ ){1,3} ) )
][
    print "$1<$2>$3"
]gex;

__END__
this finds and matches and highlights matches.