Vocabulary

Vaclav Brezina

doi:10.1017/9781316410899.003

2 - Vocabulary

Frequency, Dispersion and Diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2018

Vaclav Brezina

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Vaclav Brezina: Affiliation:
Lancaster University

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Summary

In this chapter, we’ll be looking at simple statistical measures that will help us describe the occurrence of words in texts and corpora. The chapter starts with the definition of a word (token, type, lemma and lexeme) and goes on to describe different types of frequency (absolute and relative) as well as different types of dispersion measures (SD, CV, Juilland’s D and DP). Finally, the chapter discusses various measures of lexical diversity (TTR, STTR and MATTR).

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Type: Chapter
Information: Statistics in Corpus Linguistics
A Practical Guide
, pp. 38 - 65

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316410899.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2018

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References

Advanced Reading

Baroni, M. (2009). Distributions in text. In Lüdeling, A. & Kytö, M. (eds.), Corpus linguistics: an international handbook, vol. 2, pp. 803–21. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar

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Gries, S. Th. (2009). Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora: further explorations. Corpus linguistic applications: current studies, new directions, Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar

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Tweedie, F. & Baayen, R. H. (1998). How variable may a constant be? Measures of lexical richness in perspective. Computers and the Humanities, 32, 323–52.Google Scholar

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