[Corpora-List] Frequency of the pronoun I

[Mike Scott]

On page 45 of the 3 September issue of New Scientist, there is a table 
giving frequencies of "the 20 most frequently used words in the English 
languiage, across both spoken and written texts". The first is I, then 
THE, AND, TO, A, OF, THAT... ME,ON,BUT.
I wrote to the author, James Pennemaker of the U of Texas, about this, 
expressing my surprise at the pronoun I having greater frequency than 
THE, as even in the spoken-only section of the BNC (10m words) we find I 
occurring only just over half as often as THE. His data contains a mix 
of spoken and written with a large amount of blog data. He reports that 
with all his studies in the USA and Mexico, "people always use more I 
more than THE.  It's never close."
Can anyone help here, clearing up the position? Someone with access to a 
really top quality corpus, more up to date and representative than the BNC?

Mike

-- 
Mike Scott

***
If you publish research which uses WordSmith, do let me know so I can include it at
http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/corpus_linguistics_links/papers_using_wordsmith.htm
***
University of Aston and Lexical Analysis Software Ltd.
mike.scott at aston.ac.uk
www.lexically.net


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