Basic Frequency Analysis — or What Can (Single) Words Tell Us About Texts?
Martin Weisser · 2015
This chapter describes methods that can be considered a starting point for providing some quick hints as to which particular type of language we are dealing with in our corpus analysis by investigating how frequently certain words occur in a corpus. In order to develop this understanding thoroughly, often in corpus linguistics, we need to look at this task from at least two different angles, a theoretical and a practical one. The chapter starts with some theoretical considerations, and then sees whether or how this may affect the way we carry out frequency analyses, or if we need to interpret them. It uses the bottom-up description of potential units, working the way up from the level of the ‘word’. Then, the chapter moves on to discuss longer sequences of units, both fixed, as in idioms or proverbs, and flexible, as in different types of more or less formulaic phrases.