Lexical dispersion and corpus design

Abstract

Abstract Lexical dispersion is typically measured across arbitrary corpus parts of equal size. In this study, we apply DA – a new dispersion index designed for unequal-sized corpus parts – to the British National Corpus (BNC) in a series of cases studies to show that the dispersion of a word is strongly influenced by the corpus units or parts it is measured across. Our results show that dispersion should be measured and interpreted based on corpus units that are linguistically meaningful for a particular research goal. We conclude with recommendations to help researchers select meaningful corpus units for measuring and interpreting lexical dispersion.