Lexicography

Range Analysis Introduction This paper analyzes the appropriateness of the text Live River (a short story consists of 1428 running words) for students who have mastered the most frequent 2000 words, but have not reached higher levels. Apart from that, modifications based on the data from “Vocabprofiler” are given in order to reach the 98% text coverage or more, so that students can get ideal comprehension. “Vocabprofiler” (Cobb, 2002), a software for lexical text analysis, classifies the words by their frequency bands. Meanwhile, you can also see the number of words that are likely to be unknown by students. It is used to analyze the text combining with the BNC/COCA-25 (Nation & Davies), a list derived from the original British National Corpus (BNC). Data Analysis The “Vocabprofiler” output provides a clear distribution of the word families, types and tokens in the text. According to the data (Table 1), the cumulative coverage of tokens in K-1 word level is 88.73%, including 1267 tokens. The figure for cumulative coverage in K-2 word level is 93.21%. There are 64 tokens in this word level, which takes up 4.48% of total token amount. The “Off-List” consists of 9 types, accounting for 53 tokens. Among them, 6 types are proper nouns (Kenny, Archer, Robert, Amazon, rainforest and weekend). “Kenny”, “Archer”, “Robert” and “Amazon” are names, occurring 5,13,15 and 1 times respectively. The six words account for 3.57% tokens. Many researchers believe that proper nouns have a…

Why are Dictionaries and Thesauruses Helpful? Beatrice Laberge Dictionaries and thesauruses are extremely helpful for everyone. whether its to find how to spell a misspelled word to wanting to sound formal with high "quality" words. They are found almost everywhere. There are many ways a dictionary/thesaurus can be used. Examples are they help people use words correctly, improve vocabulary, and correct misspelled words. First, Dictionaries and Thesauruses help people use words correctly. If,…

“Education without the Bible is useless.” - Noah Webster. Noah webster was an American lexicographer, a lexicographer is a person who wrote, edited, and compiled dictionaries. Also, he taught millions of Americans to read and write. He has been called “The father of scholarship and education”. While Noah Webster was a student, and also a teacher in schools, he noticed that the American education system needed to be modernized. Despite Noah Webster’s poor education, he had the courage, the…

being used by your new classmate. Have you ever wondered why people speak English differently, and who has established what is correct or incorrect? In David F. Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage (2001)” published in Harper’s Magazine, he is able to explore the answers behind these issues and uncover the “Usage Wars”. Author David F. Wallace loosely reviews Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, while addressing problems in lexicography, explicating the Descriptivist and…

David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage” is a book review on Bryan A. Garners “A dictionary of Modern American usage”. Wallace begins his review by stating that he believes Garners dictionary to be very good, however the only way for him to explain the magnitude of why Garners dictionary is good is to delve into the underlying strife involved in the politics of lexicography. He explains that there are “Usage Wars” which are silent wars fought in the introductory pages of…

Perseverance in one’s mind is used through isolation and intuitiveness in order to formulate a sentimental composed faith. Shakespeare’s work is wrapped in ribbons of glistening dramatic collaborations, and utter simplicity. His work is very un-dimensional with variations in religion, written lexicography of the time, and the authorization of a new world through spiritual doggedness. Shakespeare’s life, a sweet harmonious journey conveys his spiritual alchemical process of his self-being.…

father-figure type men, but to “…all males of the previous generation on the father’s side.” (pg.175). This misunderstanding not only led to confusion as to why certain men were called tama and others weren’t, but limited understanding of how the Melanesian peoples culture was structured. Furthermore, as Hocart continues, we see another example of how misconstrued words may shift and alter perception. This confusion was born out of a mistranslation of the Fijian word “wati”. Taken to mean…

“no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection” (62, Chopin). She repeats the kinds of relationships she’s had in the past. Edna’s cold marriage mirrors her relationship with her unaffectionate father. Both relationships leave her feeling unfulfilled, as do her shallow relationships with Robert and Arobin. Yaeger’s strictly linguistic view correctly includes that language contributes to Edna’s feeling of isolation. Because she cannot express or explain her feelings…

a body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment” (6). Within the text, Said makes it clear that there is no such thing as “pure” knowledge, but rather all knowledge is shaped by ideological positions. For Said, the link between ideology and writing is not simplistic at all, but still it is unavoidable. It is with this in mind that Said describes Orientalism “as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large…

In a world where communication and sharing of thoughts across the globe is constant and near instantaneous, there is much insight towards human culture that can be extracted from what people say and write (Michel et al, 2010). Through analysis of the frequency of words contained in over five million books spanning hundreds of years, a culturomics study carried out by researchers from Harvard allowed the inspection of cultural trends in human history and gave us the ability to use those trends as…