Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe’s Essays and Short Stories have been widely analyzed throughout the decades. Previous research confirms an ample use of varied vocabulary in his short stories. Nevertheless, little emphasis has been put on some of his not-so-famous works: his essays. Thus, the main aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, we aim at comparing the lexical semantic richness in Poe’s essays and in his short stories; on the other hand, we intend to test the effectiveness of two different analytical tools to check this semantic variation, i.e. WordSmith Tools and Range. In order to achieve these aims, three short stories and two essays by Poe were selected and combined to create two main corpora: one of short stories and one of essays. After separating the corpora intro fragments of 2000 tokens, lexical semantic richness was assessed using the two aforementioned tools. Results show that i) lexical semantic richness is higher in short stories than it is in essays, and ii) both tools have proven to be effective. These results are further discussed and pedagogical applications for language teaching are put forward.
Highlights
Lexical semantic richness is a concept which is difficult to be defined
III.Results and Discussion After analyzing Poe’s full corpus with WordSmith Tools, we found that the shorter the work is the higher the lexical variation is
The aim of the project was to determine the differences in lexical semantic richness in Poe’s different genres, as well as the validity of two tools commonly used among linguists (WordSmith Tools and Range)
Summary
Lexical semantic richness is a concept which is difficult to be defined. It may include a series of characteristics such as lexical variation, sophistication, and density or originality, among others. The aim of lexical semantic richness is to measure to some extent the vocabulary size and use that a speaker makes of their lexicon. This becomes a relevant parameter since it allows researchers to infer the level of proficiency of a speaker (either L1 or L2/FL) as far as vocabulary is concerned. Measuring lexical semantic richness is quite a difficult task, though. The high number of variables and the difficulty of considering them all individually make the statement of the lexical semantic richness in just one item a very hard undertaking
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