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  • Applied Linguistics-2015-Brezina-1-22

    Rights statement: © Oxford University Press 2013 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Is there a core general vocabulary?: introducing the New General Service List

Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>28/02/2015
<mark>Journal</mark>Applied Linguistics
Issue number1
Volume36
Number of pages22
Pages (from-to)1-22
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date26/08/13
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The current study presents a New General Service List (new-GSL), which is a result of robust comparison of four language corpora (LOB, BNC, BE06, and EnTenTen12) of the total size of over 12 billion running words. The four corpora were selected to represent a variety of corpus sizes and approaches to representativeness and sampling. In particular, the study investigates the lexical overlap among the corpora in the top 3,000 words based on the average reduced frequency (ARF), which is a measure that takes into consideration both frequency and dispersion of lexical items. The results show that there exists a stable vocabulary core of 2,122 items (70.7%) among the four corpora. Moreover, these vocabulary items occur with comparable ranks in the individual wordlists. In producing the new-GSL, the core vocabulary items were combined with new items frequently occurring in the corpora representing current language use (BE06 and EnTenTen12). The final product of the study, the new-GSL, consists of 2,494 lemmas and covers between 80.1 and 81.7 per cent of the text in the source corpora.

Bibliographic note

© Oxford University Press 2013 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.