20.284, Qs: Statistics of English Vocabulary

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LINGUIST List: Vol-20-284. Thu Jan 29 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.284, Qs: Statistics of English Vocabulary

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1)
Date: 28-Jan-2009
From: Richard Hudson < dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk >
Subject: Statistics of English Vocabulary

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:49:39
From: Richard Hudson [dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk]
Subject: Statistics of English Vocabulary

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Dear All,

I wonder if someone could help me with two statistical question about the
vocabulary of English (as found in corpus work - at this point I'm not
asking for figures for individual speakers, though they would be really
fascinating to know if anyone has them).

Q1. How many morphemes are there? (I'm sure I've seen a figure somewhere,
the point being, of course, that it's much smaller than the number of
lexemes (lemmas, lexical items).

Q2. What percentage of the total vocabulary belongs to the various major
word classes? Better still, how does this percentage vary with frequency?
(I assume for example that rare words tend to be nouns.)

If there's enough response I'll summarise back to the list.

Best wishes,   Dick Hudson 

Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics






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