LINGUIST List 20.413: Vocabulary Statistics

LINGUIST List 20.413
Mon Feb 09 2009 Sum: Vocabulary Statistics Editor for this issue: Dan Parker <danlinguistlist.org>
To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.
Directory 1. Richard Hudson, Vocabulary Statistics Message 1: Vocabulary Statistics
Date: 07-Feb-2009 From: Richard Hudson <dickling.ucl.ac.uk> Subject: Vocabulary Statistics E-mail this message to a friend 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 Read more issues\|LINGUIST home page\|Top of issue

Please report any bad links or misclassified data

While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed
on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.