Hi, Michael (& others),
The only cases that come to mind (for English) of nouns whose plurals are
probably more common than their singulars (eg 'dice') are probably not among
the 300 most common words (well, I can conceive that 'children' might be
more common than 'child'). In any case, the German corpus people may be
able to help you with the separate frequencies of singular and plural. If
that doesn't work, check my old favorite book, Helen S. Eaton, title
something like _Word Frequencies in (?4) European languages_, one of which
is German. It was published in the 40s(?) and republished in the 60s by
Dover.
On another topic, be very careful about including in psycholinguistic tests
both singulars and plurals. I don't know what that might do to the
test-taker's perceptions. It *is* good that you are using all words of the
same class and roughly similar frequencies (frequency effects were an
important reason for beginning to do the early frequency studies in the
first place), but it seems to me that you are somewhat vitiating the good
effects by using (in principle--my comments above imply my belief that there
won't be many plurals in the list in any case) some singulars and some
plurals. If you do do that, you should control for that effect in some way.
Jim
T. Florian Jaeger escribió:
> Hi,
>
> I am forwarding a question of a friend of mine (Michael Frank, please
> respond to him; I cc-ed him). He is interested in the most frequent German
> singular-plural pairs (actually he is only interested in those pairs that
> don't have English cognates, see below). Does anyone have an idea how to
> get a hold of, say, the 300 most frequent pairs or even more generally
> frequency lists of German nouns?
>
> Thx a lot in advance,
>
> Florian (the forwarded message is attached below)
> Ph.D. student in linguistics, Stanford University
>
> Forwarded message
> ======================================================
> What I'm looking for, most specifically, is the 100 most frequent
> non-english cognate object words and their pairings, and I'm looking for
> whichever part of the pairing is most frequent. So I can just take a list
> of 300 or more frequent nouns and eliminate the cognates and the object
> words. Then I'll need to find the plurals, although a plural list would
> save me a lot of dictionary time. Does that make things clearer?
> =========================================
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla MÉXICO
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