Lexical dispersion and corpus design
Jesse Egbert | Northern Arizona University
Brent Burch | Northern Arizona University
Douglas Biber | Northern Arizona University
Lexical dispersion is typically measured across arbitrary corpus parts of equal size. In this study, we apply
DA
– a new dispersion index designed for unequal-sized corpus parts – to the British National
Corpus (BNC) in a series of cases studies to show that the dispersion of a word is strongly influenced by the corpus units or
parts it is measured across. Our results show that dispersion should be measured and interpreted based on corpus units that are
linguistically meaningful for a particular research goal. We conclude with recommendations to help researchers select meaningful
corpus units for measuring and interpreting lexical dispersion.
Keywords: word frequency lists, corpus design, text, mode,
DA
Published online: 16 April 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18010.egb
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18010.egb
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Burch, Brent & Jesse Egbert
Omidian, Taha & Anna Siyanova-Chanturia
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