Some Frequency based Differences between Spoken and Written Swedish
Jens Allwood · 1998
Introduction This is a report on the differences in word frequency found between two Swedish corpora, - a transcribed spoken language corpus of 276,391 words and a written language corpus of 271,216 words. The spoken language corpus contains material from 14 activity types while the written language corpus contains material from novels (40%) and newspapers (60%). The report expands and continues earlier work on differences between spoken and written language, e.g. Jrgensen (1976) or Biber (1988). The word frequencies of the two corpora are described and more fully presented in Allwood 1996. Below I will now present some of the main differences between the corpora. 2. Word types and word occurrences 2.1 Word types on different frequency levels A first observation is that the ratios between types and tokens in the two corpora are very different. In the spoken corpus there are 276.391 tokens and 18.406 types while there are 271.216 tokens and 39.638 types in the wr