Announcing a new book:
Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British
National Corpus.
Geoffrey Leech, Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson
2001 320 pages ISBN 0582-32007-0 (Paperback)
Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English is a landmark volume in the
development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have
in general given frequency information about the written language only,
this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only
gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the
differences between spoken and written English, and between different
spoken and written varieties of the language.
The frequencies are derived from a wide ranging and up-to-date corpus of
English: the British National Corpus, which was compiled from over 4,000
written texts and spoken transcriptions representing the present day
language in the UK. The book is based on a new version of the corpus
(available from 2001) providing more accurate grammatical information,
which is essential (for example) for distinguishing words like leaves
(noun) and leaves (verb) with different meanings.
The book begins with a general introduction, explaining why such
information is important and highlighting interesting linguistic findings
that emerge from the statistical analysis of the British National Corpus
vocabulary. It also contains twenty four 'interest boxes' which highlight
and comment on different aspects of frequency - for example, the most
common colour words in English in order of frequency, and a comparison of
male words (e.g. man) and female words (e.g. woman) in terms of their
frequency.
For ordering information see the companion website at:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/bncfreq/
This website also provides downloadable sample pages from the book,
frequency lists and lists of texts and their categories.
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