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The Structural Design of Language

By Thomas S. Stroik, Michael T. Putnam

In this book, Stroik and Putnam take on Turing's challenge. They argue that the narrow syntax – the lexicon, the Numeration, and the computational system – must reside, for reasons of conceptual necessity, within the performance systems.

Query Details


Query Subject:   Statistics of English Vocabulary
Author:   Richard Hudson
Submitter Email:  click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):  Text/Corpus Linguistics

Query:   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
LL Issue: 20.284
Date posted: 29-Jan-2009



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