20.413, Sum: Vocabulary Statistics

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LINGUIST List: Vol-20-413. Mon Feb 09 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.413, Sum: Vocabulary Statistics

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1)
Date: 07-Feb-2009
From: Richard Hudson < dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk >
Subject: Vocabulary Statistics

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:45:59
From: Richard Hudson [dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk]
Subject: Vocabulary Statistics

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Query for this summary posted in LINGUIST Issue: 20.284                                                                                                                                                
 

A few weeks ago I broadcast a double query about the statistics of English
vocabulary. My first question was about the number of morphemes compared
with the number of lemmas, but nobody offered an answer. 

My second question was more successful. This was about the proportion of
lemmas in each of the main word classes, and how this proportion varied
with token frequency; I was particularly keen to check a guess that the
proportion of nouns was greater among rare lemmas than among common ones. I
received data from Gwillim Law and Jasper Holmes. It turns out that my
guess was right. I've presented and summarised the data at
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/nouniness/nouniness.htm. If anyone has
comments or further data (including data on other languages), I should of
course be most interested to hear from them. 

Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics






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LINGUIST List: Vol-20-413