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.

• Types of recent neologisms

Estimates of the relative productiveness of one or another type of word formation are subject to many variables and consequently uncertainties. Not least among those is establishing the correct etymology of a word. For example, unconscious 'that part of the mind not available to introspection, which nevertheless affects behaviour' might

• Derivation: historical and contemporary

A complication for vocabulary study is that its diachronic and synchronic facts are less distinct than those of other aspects of language, such as phonology and syntax. Many words are established in the language, learned as units, and repeated. We hear some words, such as childishness and dog biscui,, before

• Recent and older nnologisms

The percentages of words formed in English and of those borrowed from other languages in the recent corpuses contrast strikingly with those in The Shorter OED, as reported by Thomas Finkenstaedt (1973, 118-56). In the following table, the SOED percentages represent the history of English over approximately 1,200 years, as

• While lexical items spring most readily to mind when thinking of Americanisms and Briticisms

There are quite systematic differences, for instance, in the expression of modality between British and American English (see Kyto 1991 for historical discussion). Algeo (1988b) shows how grammatical differences between the two varieties are principally matters of the collocability and co-occurrence restrictions of particular words rather than of syntactic rules/*™

• The site of the vocabulary

The English vocabulary has grown much in size since 1776. Exactly how much is difficult to say even approximately because there are no accurate counts of the number of words used in English either in 1776 or today. Estimates of the size of the vocabulary based upon dictionaries are ffawed