Краткий курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка для студентов неязыковых вузов. Москалёва Е.В. - 9 стр.

                                       Statistical analysis
                   Statistical linguistics is nowadays generally recognized as
            the one of the major branches of linguistics. Statistical inquiries
            have considerable importance because of their relevance to
            certain problems of communication engineering and information
            theory. Statistical approach proved essential in the selection of
            vocabulary items of a foreign language for teaching
            purposes. Very few people know more than 10% of the words
            in their mother tongue. It follows that if we do not wish
            to waste time on committing to memorize vocabulary items
            which are never likely to be useful to the learner we
            have to select only lexical units that are commonly used by
            a native speaker .
                   Out of approximately 500 000 words listed in Oxford
            English dictionary the active vocabulary of an educated
            Englishman comprises no more than 30 000 words and of these
            4 000 - 5 000 are presumed to be amplisufficient for the daily
            needs of an average member of the English speech community.
            Thus, it is evident that the problem of selection of teaching
            vocabulary is of vital importance. Statistical techniques have
            been successfully applied in the analysis of various linguistic
            phenomena. Different structural types of words, affixes, the
            vocabularies of great writers and poets and even in the study of
            some problems of Historical Lexicology.
                   Statistical regularities can be observed only if the
            phenomena under analysis are sufficiently numerous. Thus, the
            first requirement of any statistic investigation is the size of the
            sample. It is known that comparatively small group of words
            makes up the bulk of any text. It was found that approximately
            1300 – 1500 most frequent words make up 85% of all words
            occurring in the text. If however we analyze a sample of 60 words
            it is hard to predict the number of occurrences of most frequent
            words.
                   e. g. If we take the word “room” we can find some meanings
            of the word:



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