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LINGUIST List 20.284

Thu Jan 29 2009

Qs: Statistics of English Vocabulary

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        1.    Richard Hudson, Statistics of English Vocabulary
Message 1: Statistics of English Vocabulary
Date: 28-Jan-2009
From: Richard Hudson <dickling.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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