[Corpora-List] Frequency of the pronoun I

[WHITELOCK, Pete]

The American blogs sub-corpus of the Oxford English Corpus contains around 89m words of post 2000 text. The frequencies are as follows

the	4.2m
I	1.3m



Pete Whitelock
Head of Language Engineering, Dictionaries
Reference Department
Academic Division
Oxford University Press


-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Mike Scott
Sent: 13 September 2011 15:33
To: corpora at uib.no
Cc: jwpennebaker at gmail.com
Subject: [Corpora-List] Frequency of the pronoun I

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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