Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English is a landmark volume in the development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have in general given frequency information about the written language only, this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the differences between spoken and written English, and between different spoken and written varieties of the language.
The frequencies are derived from a wide ranging and up-to-date corpus of English: the British National Corpus, which was compiled from over 4,000 written texts and spoken transcriptions representing the present day language in the UK. The book is based on a new version of the corpus (available from 2001) providing more accurate grammatical information, which is essential (for example) for distinguishing words like leaves (noun) and leaves (verb) with different meanings.
The book begins with a general introduction, explaining why such
information is important and highlighting interesting linguistic
findings that emerge from the statistical analysis of the British
National Corpus vocabulary. It also contains twenty four 'interest
boxes' which highlight and comment on different aspects of frequency -
for example, the most common colour words in English in order of
frequency, and a comparison of male words (e.g. man) and female words
(e.g. woman) in terms of their frequency.
Geoffrey Leech is Research Professor in English Linguistics at
Lancaster University. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of more
than 20 books (most of them published by Longman) on Linguistics and
the English Language.
Paul Rayson is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing,
Lancaster University and has extensive experience of statistical corpus
analysis and corpus annotation.
Andrew Wilson is a Lecturer in Computer Corpus Linguistics at Lancaster
University He has been involved in corpus research since 1990 and has
written several books, including Corpus Linguistics (1996, co-authored
with Tony McEnery).