Corpora: Summary: simplified English wordlists

Przemyslaw KASZUBSKI (przemka@main.amu.edu.pl)
Sat, 3 Oct 1998 16:46:37 +0000

Hi,

I while ago I posted the following message:

> I'm looking for electronic versions of any of the established
> (frequency) wordlists of "simplified English" (e.g. West's _General
> Service List_; Simple English; Longman Defining Vocabulary; any of
> the 1,000 or so most popular/important and the like words; etc.).

Here's a list of the responses I got plus a few self-made
discoveries. Some reponses related specifically to frequency lists
for English, which no doubt many of you will know about. However, I
do include them in the second half of the report.

I. "Simplified English" wordlists:

1. Modified West's General Service List (c. 2,000 word families with
all word-forms) + University WordList (836) are available with Paul
Nation's VocabProfile package from:

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals

Alternatively you will find them also on Robert Waring's page - the
exact URL escapes me at the moment but a Web search for "Word
Frequency Lists" + Waring should do.

2. For Longman Defining Vocabulary (2,000 lemmas with word-forms)
contact David Lee at:

DL <d.lee@lancaster.ac.uk>

3. BasicEnglish (1,000+ lemmas) can be downloaded from Chris Hogan
at:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chogan/BasicEnglish.html

"There are five main parts to the Basic English word list: operators,
things (general), things (pictured), qualities (general), qualities
(opposite). Also there are some rules and idioms."

II. Relevant frequency wordlists

1. Susanne Borgwaldt <Susanne.Borgwaldt@mpi.nl> suggested checking
the CELEX database at http://www.kun.nl/celex/

CELEX doesn't deal with simplified English, but contains many
interesting frequency lists, including morphological and
phonological information. Unfortunately, it is not available on-line
to researchers of English or German, only Dutch.

Richard Piepenbrock, CELEX Project Manager, has said the best thing
to do is to order a CD ROM version from the Linguistic Data
Consortium. Details from:

http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc/catalog/html/lexical_html/celex.html

2. BNC frequency (and alphabetical + more) lists prepared by Adam
Kilgarriff can be downloaded via his page
http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff from

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

Przemek Kaszubski

==========================================
Przemyslaw Kaszubski, M.A.
przemka@amu.edu.pl
http://elex.amu.edu.pl/ifa/skaszub.htm

MY (ENGLISH) (LEARNER) CORPORA PAGE:
http://main.amu.edu.pl/~przemka

School of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
Al. Niepodleglosci 4
61-874 Poznan, POLAND
tel: +48 61 8528820
fax: +48 61 8523103
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