[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[Ron Moe]

One discovery (that has implications for us) was when I was trying to think
of English example words for each domain in my list of semantic domains. I
found that a high percentage were multi-word lexical items. In some domains
I quickly ran out of single word entries, but could think of lots of
phrases. This phenomenon was repeated in a couple of workshops for Bantu
languages. The speakers were generating about 25% phrases.

I presume (without a lot of data to back me up) that our dictionaries should
have a goodly percentage of multi-word entries. A quick scan of Longman's
Language Activator shows about 50% multi-word entries. Can anyone give
figures for their dictionaries? Has anyone worked at identifying/generating
multi-word lexical items in such a way that they can estimate the percentage
of idioms vs single words in a language? I realize that there is a gradation
from collocation to idiom, so that it may be difficult to draw a line.

Ron Moe
SIL, Uganda

-----Original Message-----
From: List Facilitator [mailto:lexicography2004 at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 10:11 PM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries


What are one or two of the most interesting discoveries that stand out for
you (plural) in any of the lexical research that you have done?



Wayne Leman
Cheyenne dictionary project




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