Predictability of Word Forms (Types) and Lemmas in Linguistic Corpora. A Case Study Based on the Analysis of the CUMBRE Corpus

Various research centres and publishing companies all around the world have been developing corpus resources for many years, and there has been a growing awareness throughout the eighties of their importance to linguistic and lexicographic work. To give some idea of scale, the British National Corpus contains 100 million words, and its counterpart for Spanish—compiled by the Spanish Real Academia de la Lengua—will reach 100 million words at first and 200 million words in a second stage. However, little convincing research has been done in the direction of sample size—directly connected to a further topic: representativeness. We shall investigate here a related issue: Is it possible to predict the different word forms and lemmas of a given corpus? And if so, how? A positive answer to this question may contribute to decision making regarding some aspects of representativeness in given fields. We shall attempt further to find a reliable procedure to predict the total number of word forms (types) and lemmas in a specific corpus.