Corpora (not corporae)

Royle Phaedra (roylep@MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA)
Wed, 12 Mar 1997 11:30:15 -0500 (EST)

I recently made a query on linguist list and corpora for word
lists with frequency counts in Bulgarian, Polish, Greek, Turkish and
English (excluding Kucera and Francis). Many people responded with
helpfull comments, which are summarised below. Unfortunately, nothing was
found on Greek. If any additions seem necessary, please write back to me.

Thanks,

Phaedra
PhD student
Universite de Montreal
Centre de recherche theophile alajouanine

On English:

Gan Wee Keong <ellganwk@leonis.nus.sg>

The British National Corpus word frequency
lists generated by Adam Kilgarriff. As the various lists are categorised
in certain manners, read the README file first before downloading.

To get the lists, do a ftp to:

ftp.itri.bton.ac.uk/pub/bnc
-------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Richard Piepenbrock <celex@mpi.nl>

THE CELEX CD-ROM PRODUCED BY THE DUTCH CENTRE FOR LEXICAL
INFORMATION
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE LINGUISTIC DATA CONSORTIUM

The Second Release of the CD-ROM, which contains the CELEX lexical
databases of English (version 2.5), Dutch (version 3.1) and German
(version 2.5), is now available for research purposes from the
Linguistic Data Consortium for $150. For each language, the CD-ROM
contains detailed information on the orthography (variations in
spelling, hyphenation), the phonology (phonetic transcriptions,
variations in pronunciation, syllable structure, primary stress), the
morphology (derivational and compositional structure, inflectional
paradigms), the syntax (word class, word-class specific
subcategorisations, argument structures), and word frequency (summed
word and lemma counts, based on recent and representative text
corpora) of both wordforms and lemmas (English: 52446 lemmas, 160594
wordforms; German: 51728 lemmas, 365530 wordforms; Dutch: 124136
lemmas, 381292 wordforms).

--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Llu=EDs Padr=F3 <padro@lsi.upc.es>

I have ftp available an English frequency list extracted from 1.1 milion =
words
of WSJ.

ftp anonymous to ftp-lsi.upc.es
cd pub/lluisp
get wsj.freq
--------------------------------------------------------------------

"M. Lynne Roecklein" <lynne@cc.gifu-u.ac.jp>

You may be wanting only very formal frequency lists, or you've probably
already checked out the following, but if not, there are 'lists of defining
words' in the l995 __Cambridge International Dictionary of English__
(which claims frequency was one of the factors in the assembly of that list
but does not name its references) and the l993 __Longman Language
Activator__ (which refers to the Longman Corpus Network data concerning
frequency). The Collins Cobuild people must also have done frequency work
on their corpus, which I understand is rather extensive, to arrive at a
defining vocabulary, but nothing is said in their standard dictionary. I
realize that these dictionaries are specialized in various ways, but their
defining word list would include only high frequency words.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

"James L. Fidelholtz" <jfidel@cen.buap.mx>

On English: There's always the granddaddy of all frequency
counts, Thorndike & Lorge, ca. 1943, probably still in print at Columbia
U. Teachers College Press (later impressions, of course). The most
accessible 'recent' version would probably be John Carroll's (title may
be slightly off) _The American Heritage word frequency book_, published
approx. 1980 by AH. There's also some fairly recent Scandinavian stuff
(in the 80's) on English, but I forget now the authors' names (on the
basis, if I remember correctly, of the Brown corpus).
If you need more info, let me know, and I'll scour the stacks at
home. Please let me know what you run across, as I'm always interested
in frequency studies.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Ntirampeba Pascal <ntirampp@ERE.UMontreal.CA>

An other english word list is given by :
Johansson, S. & K. Hofland. 1989."Frequency analysis of english
vocabulary and grammar. Oxford:Clarendon Press.

_____________________________________________________________
POLISH

"James L. Fidelholtz" <jfidel@cen.buap.mx>

With respect to Polish, there is a frequency count (or is it a
'backwards dictionary'?) for at least some poems of a Polish poet whose
name escapes me at the moment. Ah, yes, there are frequency counts of at
least the press by, I believe, Topolin'ska (Maria?), but super hard to
come by -- check the OCLC and LC listings -- it would have been published
in the early or middle 70's, in several volumes. I think I have some of
them, but I'm not sure.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Andrzej Lyda <kotlet@zeus.polsl.gliwice.pl>

A kind of frequency list was compiled by Tadeusz Piotrowski of Institute
of English,
Wroclaw University for the purposes of a Polish-English dictionary. He
has also
published: Contemporary English: Word Lists. Part I-II. Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu
Wroclawskiego. 1993. ISBN: 83-229-0940-3. =20

I would also contact PWN, Warsaw (National Scientific Publishers)which
has just published
a CD-ROM edition of the Dictionary of Contemporary Polish.

Andrzej Lyda
Institute of English
University of Silesia
Sosnowiec
Polad

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Tilman Berger <tilman.berger@uni-tuebingen.de>

There is a frequency dictionary for Polish:

Slownik frekwencyjny polszczyzny wspolczesne. Ed. Ida Kurcz et al.
Krakow: Polska Akademia Nauk, Institut Jezyka Polskiego. Vol. 1, 1990.
Vol. 2, 1990.

Prof. Dr. Tilman Berger
Slavisches Seminar
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstr. 50
D-72074 Tuebingen

Tel. 07071/29-76733 (Universitaet)
07071/63365 (privat)

e-mail: tilman.berger@uni-tuebingen.de
________________________________________________________________
BULGARIAN

Kjetil Ra Hauge <K.R.Hauge@easteur-orient.uio.no>

For Bulgarian:

Nikolova, Cvetanka: CHestoten rechnik na bylgarskata razgovorna rech,
Sofija 1987

Todorova, Elena; Rada Panchovska: CHestoten rechnik na bylgarskata
publicistika (1944-1989), Sofija 1995

The latter is rarer than a Gutenberg bible, the total printing is 25 (!)
copies.

_________________________________________________________________
TURKISH

Kemal Oflazer <ko@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>

We do not have frequency lists yet but for general Turkish stuff
you can look at http://www.nlp.cs.bilkent.edu.tr.
We have some morpological disambiguated corpora poosted there however
they are quite short. We have some root word occurence statistics for
those but they may not be very meaningful.

Kemal Oflazer e-mail: ko@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~ko/ko.html
Bilkent University tel: (90-312) 266-4133 (Sec)
Computer Engineering Department 266-4000 x1258 (Off)
Bilkent, ANKARA, 06533 TURKIYE 240-1627 (Home)
fax: (90-312) 266-4126