[Lexicog] Re: Frequency & Attendant Words/Phrases for Lex. Entry

Rudolph Troike rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU
Thu May 31 18:50:49 UTC 2007


As has been discussed on this list before, frequency is not a helpful guide
to usage beyond perhaps a basic vocabulary, since vocabulary frequency follows
Zipf's Law. All frequency counts are greatly affected by the provenance and
nature of the texts sampled. I well recall that in West's General Service List,
I was surprised to find that "king" was, if not THE, one of the first content
words on the list. Then I looked at the sources used, which included Shakespeare
(pace Fritz!) and the King James Bible, as well as other mainly British sources.
On the other hand, a contemporary compilation based on children's school writing
in the US found that "Santa Claus" was one of the most frequent content words.
Just last night I happened to look at a frequency list from the BNC, and found
that "British" is one of the more frequent content words. So whose list do you
choose as a basis for identifying frequency?

Just for fun, I just did a Google search for "big" and "large". I chose those
because I have noted the register-inappropriate use of "big" by my inter-
national students writing term papers and theses, which I correct to "large".
Intuitively, I imagine most English speakers would identify "big" as more
"basic" than "large", and I suspect that "big" is taught in ESL texts before
"large". To my initial surprise, I found the following figures from Google
(BNC figures added from
   http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/bncfreq/lists/1_2_all_freq.txt)

          big    625 million    BNC:  337
          large  869 million    BNC:  471

(this even includes a few acronyms BIG). On reflection, it is not so
surprising, since the Google database would reflect more formal writing
than informal speech. If I used raw frequency figures, however, I would
have to conclude that "large" should be accorded higher priority for
instruction in ESL. But consider how odd it would sound for an English
language learner to say "I have a large test tomorrow." As Hayim says,
register and context are more determinative of instructional choice. "Big"
belongs to the "basic" vocabulary which English-speaking children bring
with them to school, while "large" is part of the "Frenglish" vocabulary
that they must learn as part of becoming bilingual in learning formal
written and spoken registers of the language.

    Rudy Troike





 
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