Principal Semantic Components of Language and the Measurement of Meaning
Figure 7
Semantic characteristics of the frequency of word usage.
A: cumulative distribution of vector length of all words in MS English, with dotted horizontal lines at the 2.5th, 50th, and 97.5th percentiles. The arrow indicates the mean weighted by the British National Corpus (BNC) frequency distribution. B: MS English word sorting by the frequency of their usage according to two independent sources (see Materials and Methods): Australian database (blue) and BNC (red). C: Values of the first 4 PCs of the weighted average of all words according to the Australian database frequencies. As in Figure 4, the bars and corresponding numbers represent the PC coordinate values and their percentage of the standard deviation of each PC (in the case of BNC frequencies, the corresponding numbers are: 64.0+7.5%, 13.3+6.4%, −15.4+11.9%, and 10.2+6.4%). Standard errors are reported for both bars (as whiskers) and numbers. Only the first component is statistically significant.