Overview and Conclusions
David D. Malvern, Brian Richards, Ngoni Chipere, Pilar Durán · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2004
At the beginning of this book, we compared the search for a single, all-embracing, measure of the quality of vocabulary deployment with ‘a quest for the Holy Grail’. As we have shown, even for the attempt to define a valid measure of lexical diversity independent of text length, the journey, like all such quests, has been full of wrong turnings, false dawns, and confusion. That there has been confusion is in no doubt (see, for example, Malvern and Richards, 1997; Richards and Malvern, 1997), and research results have frequently been uninterpretable, or possibly wrong, because the authors are unaware of, or simply ignore, the sensitivity to sample size of simplistic measures, such as NDW, TTR, and related indices. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.