Frequent English Words Research Articles

Quantification of rewriting by the Brothers Grimm: A comparison of successive versions of three tales

A comparison was made of the levels and patterns of emotional tone scores in four successive versions of three stories that have been translated from German by Ellis to illustrate his argument that the Grimm Brothers made extensive revisions from the proported manuscript of the stories to their celebrated first edition versions. This objective analysis was based upon the evaluation, activity, and potency of the emotions connoted by those of the 1000 most frequent English words detected by the computer as occurring in the narratives. The stores were:The King's Daughter and The Enchanted Prince: Frog King, Sleeping Beauty, andThe Little Brother and Little Sister (Hansel and Gretel). Changes in story length, in mean levels of emotional tone, and in patterns of emotional tone across story versions support Ellis's judgement that subsequent revisions were less drastic than the first one, from the manuscript. It was also shown that the stories are quite different from each other in level and pattern of emotional tone.

Computer Assisted Enhancement of Emotional Tone Accuracy in Translated Narrative

Translators experience difficulty in preserving connotative meaning in translation from English to French, or vice versa, while guarding the integrity of denotative meaning. In this article the feasibility of a computer assisted system of aiding the translator is examined. Previously, computer assisted tools for investigating the emotional tone pattern of text have been developed, depending upon the semantic scores of evaluation, activity, and potency in the thousand most frequent English words. In this article, the extension of that approach to French is encouraged by evidence of a close correspondence between the Emotionality ratings of a sample of French words and the evaluation scores of their English equivalents. Additionally, a prototype program was used to test how effectively a translator could modify text so that it corresponds more closely in emotional tone pattern to its original. The next phase of this research would be the creation of a connotative meaning dictionary in French (or other language) corresponding to the one now used for English.

Toetsen en Beheersingleren Van Het Engelse Vocabularium op Universitair Niveau.

As there is a general complaint about the poor lexical competence of students in non-English speaking universities, and as there is certainly no hope of remedying this by means of an increase in the academic staff, we have decided to measure our students' English vocabulary mastery (recalling of words) at the very start of their anglistic studies, so as to provide them with adjustable mastery-learning strategies, performable at computer terminals. In this paper we present the test's components and its measuring capacity. We use the 2000 most frequent English words, obtained by means of a merger of three objective frequency lists of about 1.000.000 words (the Brown Corpus, the Leuven Drama Corpus and the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus), presented in a descending rank list; to each word the inflected forms and derivatives have been added. We also have combined this objective frequency with two subjective selections; the defining vocabulary of 2000 LDOCE-words (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1978) and 1500 words from J.C. Richards' Familiarity Count (1971). The words of these two lists that do not overlap with the frequency-words are considered as components of the test-corpus. The students who score below the means obtained for this test (in the Flemish part of Belgium + 111/150 in October 1980) get the opportunity to increase their vocabulary mastery by means of having to study a number of texts; they have to learn the new words (outsiders) in these texts and practise again the words they supposedly know. The analysis of the texts, the ordering according to the degrees of difficulty, the definition of outsiders, the construction of exercises on the outsiders and on the supposedly-known words between positions 501 - 2000 in the descending ranklist, the exercises on cohesion, cloze, polysemy - all these operations have been subjected to automation by computer, and the software developed thus far is operational. In the present paper the results obtained during the session of Mastery-Learning from October 1980 to March 1981 is presented, explained and discussed.

Semantic differential profiles for 1,000 most frequent English words.

Semantic differential profiles for 1,000 most frequent English words.