Studies on Lexical Availability: the Current Situation and Some Future Prospects

Abstract

In linguistics, the statistical study of lexicon is a field of investigation that has a long history. Since the appearance in 1949 of the information theory by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, numerous advances have been made in the field of lexicon-statistics. Consequently, in many linguistic disciplines the concept of lexical frequency has become particularly important, making reference to the greater or lesser regularity in which a lexical unit appears within a set of texts. Some years earlier, George K. Zipf had formulated the famous Zipf’s Law, which was used to calculate the ranks of linguistic units and the frequency with which they appear in a text. This law states that the rank of a linguistic unit is inversely proportional to its frequency of use, meaning that those units that are positioned high up in the list of ranks (i.e. those with a lower rank) are the most frequently used, which happen to be grammatical words, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, etc. As opposed to frequency, which is a calculation that does not depend on the nature and purpose of the text in which the words exist, the concept of lexical availability is generally based on the distinction between thematic words and non-thematic words. According to this distinction, lexical frequency would be made up of those words that appear in any type of text regardless of the subject, which includes non-thematic words, whereas lexical availability would be formed by the lexical elements that the speakers have in their mental lexicon and whose use is determined by the specific theme of the text, which are known as thematic words. The combination of both makes up the basic (or fundamental) lexicon of a language. However, from this emerges a theoretical problem that we will only mention here. The specific themes that we have referred to are made up of the so-called areas of interest that are used in order to obtain the linguistic data that is the subject of this study. Consequently, the area of interest is the key factor when it comes to maintaining this theoretical focus for the study of a language’s lexicon, given that this type of contextualisation acts as a focus or attractor in the processing of the lexicon that is realised verbally as a result of such a stimulus. Consequently, we should ask ourselves which areas should be used, or which are likely to provide a more exact repertoire, given that the limits of the repertoire of a given community’s available lexicon will by definition depend on the areas of interest that are used for its obtaining.