Wordfrequency

The frequency with which words are used has implications as a practical matter in stylistics, for example in setting an appropriate reading level for school books.

The word frequencies in two standard corpuses of English, the Brown Corpus for American and the LOB Corpus for British, are reported by Hofland and Johansson (1982). In the LOB Corpus, the 100 most frequent words are, with only 8 exceptions, grammatical words. The 10 most frequent words in that corpus are the, of, and, to, a, in, that, is, was, it. The 8 non-grammatical words among the 100 most frequent are said, time, Mr, made, new, man, years, people. The analysis made by Hofland and Johansson (1982) was of word shapes; so for example, say, says, saying, said were each counted as separate words, whereas time the noun and time the verb were counted as the same word. A subder analysis appears in Johansson and Hofland (1989), which deals with the LOB Corpus only, but analyses a tagged version distinguishing various classes of words. That analysis presents the frequencies of word shapes and also of forms belonging to differentword classes. In addition, it gives frequencies of typical combinations of words and of word classes.

Magnus Ljung (1974) has made a study of the frequency of morphemes to be found in a list (Thoren 1959) adapted from the 8,000 most frequent words in the Thorndike-Lorge (1959) list. The last was compiled to show word frequencies for pedagogical use.




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