Counting: Word frequency and beyond
Costas Gabrielatos · Edge Hill University · 2013
Overall, this session will focus on a more comprehensive view of 'frequency: it will discuss how the normalized word frequency in a corpus may not always be the best way to count instances of a linguistic feature, and why it is best to view the normalized frequency of a linguistic unit as the number of instances of a feature out of the total number of opportunities for it to appear (Ball, 1994). The session will also focus on how the total number of instances (however measured) may be misleading on its own, and may need to be supplemented with metrics of dispersion/spread. Regarding word frequency, the session will show how token and type frequencies can be examined in combination – not collapsed into a single type-token ratio metric, but visualised two-dimensionally in a scatterplot.