This book is an introduction to the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions, intended for linguists, psycholinguistics, and researchers work ing in the field of quantitative stylistics and anyone interested in quantitative aspects of lexical structure. Word frequency distributions are characterized by very large numbers of rare words. This property leads to strange statisti cal phenomena such as mean frequencies that systematically keep changing as the number of observations is increased, relative frequencies that even in large samples are not fully reliable estimators...

This volume consists of selected papers from the 2009 meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics. The chapters cover aspects of language use (usage-based accounts of morphology/syntax of English and Tok Pisin), language learning (corpus-based learning of English, syntactic development observable in a Learner Corpus of English, "core" vocabulary items for learners of English) and language documentation (a new and innovative usage-based frequency dictionary of English, proposals to broaden the traditional understanding of a corpus in various directions, e.g., constructing a...