What's in a Word-list? Investigating Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities Series

The frequency with which particular words are used in a text can tell us something meaningful both about that text and also about its author because their choice of words is seldom random. Focusing on the most frequent lexical items of a number of generated word frequency lists can help us to determine whether all the texts are written by the same author. Alternatively, they might wish to determine whether the most frequent words of a given text (captured by its word frequency list) are suggestive of potentially meaningful patterns that could have been overlooked had the text been read manually. This edited collection brings together cutting-edge research written by leading experts in the field on the construction of word-lists for the analysis of both frequency and keyword usage. Taken together, these papers provide a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the most exciting research being conducted in this subject.

Contents: Does frequency really matter?, Dawn Archer; Word frequency use or misuse?, John M. Kirk; Word frequency, statistical stylistics and authorship attribution, David L. Hoover; Word frequency in context: alternative architectures for examining related words, register variation and historical change, Mark Davies; Issues for historical and regional corpora: first catch your word, Christian Kay; In search of a bad reference corpus, Mike Scott; Keywords and moral panics: Mary Whitehouse and media censorship, Tony McEnery; 'The question is, how cruel is it?' Keywords, foxhunting and the House of Commons, Paul Baker; Love - 'a familiar or a devil'? An exploration of key domains in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, Dawn Archer, Jonathan Culpeper and Paul Rayson; Promoting the wider use of word frequency and keyword extraction techniques, Dawn Archer; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

Dawn Archer, Reader in Corpus Linguistics and Head of English Language and Linguistics, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK.