Petra Steiner

Effects of polylexy on compounding

Abstract In this paper the relation between polylexy and composition activity is derived from a synergetic model and is investigated using a German dictionary. The results lead to the conclusion that the hypothesis can be considered as confirmed. Furthermore, a comparison with Rothe (1988) shows the importance of using unbiased material in quantitative linguistic investigation.

Identifying Content and Function Words in Non-Annotated Corpora

In every corpus of natural language texts there are some tendencies which occur due to common properties of language, as for example, the principle of least effort. One of those phenomema is a typical distribution of frequency classes: a relatively small number of word types covers the bulk of text, while on the other hand a huge part of the vocabulary occurs only one time. The latter types are called singletons or hapax legomena.