WHAT 2 WORD PHRASES MEANS ESSENTIAL OR HIGHLY DESIRABLE PLUS
I have occasionally given counts of both headwords only and headwords plus first-order subwords, where there was an appreciable difference in those cases the count of headwords plus first-order subwords is closest to a count of lemmatized words. There are two major types: the glossary or wordlist included at the end of a descriptive grammar, and the self-standing monographic dictionary. Table 1 below shows the results of a survey of a quick convenience sample of glossaries and dictionaries that I have used and found excellent. Recent field and descriptive dictionaries do well by these criteria. (Of course, to be strictly comparable to Cheng's sources that would need to be 17 hours of high-quality text, comparable in lexical, stylistic, and thematic range to the best written and edited literature.) That would be about 17 real-time hours: see section 4 below. That said, evidently one needs close to 100,000 words per individual to have any chance of capturing that individual's entire active lexical range. for Mark Twain) a collection of short works. Finally, what Cheng surveys in this paper is not the given author's whole oeuvre but just one large work or (e.g. Also, the figure probably includes distinctly fewer technical terms than the average user knows actively. So Cheng's figure of 8000 may be a minimum, in that inclusion of more varied genres would almost certainly expand it. Mark Twain nonfiction writers appear to mostly fall in here. The sources with the higher lemma figures are writers writing for a full-fledged audience, e.g. I note that a fair amount of Cheng's English corpus appears to be literature for young adults. Cheng 2000 shows that, over time from 93BC to the present, the size of Chinese dictionaries increases regularly but the size of the individual author's vocabulary remains at a constant 4000-8000 characters.Ĭheng's results suggest a measure of adequacy for lexical documentation: it should reach the range of an individual's active vocabulary, and it should be compiled from extensive enough materials to include the entire active vocabulary for at least one good speaker and preferably several good speakers. Other sources cite vocabulary sizes ranging up to 80,000 words for the individual but this is passive vocabulary, some of it known only in the sense of being understood in context. Of the authors he has surveyed only Shakespeare reaches an exceptional 10,000 words. Cheng quotes Francis & Kucera 1982 to the effect that the Brown corpus (1,000,000 running words) contains over 30,000 lemmatized words of which just under 6000 occur more than 5 times.Ĭheng's interpretation is that 8000 words is about the maximum for an individual's actively known vocabulary.
A book of about 100,000 running words of text reaches this maximum in some cases. To make it easiest to compare dictionaries I will try to focus on what is known as the lemmatized word - the head of an inflectional paradigm and the source of very regular derivational forms such as (for English) adverb in -ly, comparative and superlative adjectives.Ĭheng 2002, 2002 (and earlier works) shows that, for both English and Chinese, any given author uses a maximum of about 4000-8000 lemmatized words. shown by large published dictionaries of major world languages, and in any case there is no particular consistency from dictionary to dictionary as to whether items are treated as headwords or subwords. Field and descriptive dictionaries rarely have the elaborate structure of subwords, etc. When a publisher lists the number of words in a dictionary (as is commonly done for European dictionaries but rarely done for ones published in the U.S.), that usually includes everything that figures as lexicalized material - headwords, subwords, idioms, examples, illustrative phrases, even principal parts, etc. the list of words it defines or translates, and the wordlist is then organized into headwords, subwords, examples, and other information. How much material is needed for minimal, normal, or optimal documentation of a language? How many entries should be in a dictionary? How large should a text corpus be? This squib is an attempt to estimate adequate and optimal sizes of corpora, measured in lemmatized words and running words, for linguistic research and for multi-purpose lexicography.Ī dictionary is constructed from a wordlist, i.e. Recommended lexicon sizes in lemmatized words. Recommended corpus sizes in running words.
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