ANÁLISIS Y SÍNTESIS DE LOS ELEMENTOS CONDICIONANTES PARA LA URBANIZACIÓN

Any study which requires the determination of vocabulary needs on the basis of word frequency counts requires a clear conception of the construct ‘word’ and its operationalization if valid conclusions are to be drawn. Generation of high frequency vocabulary is dependent on how ‘word’ is defined as a unit of analysis. Measurement of word knowledge among learners is a challenge owing to lack of consensus in the literature about what a word is. This has led researchers to produce what Read (2000, p. 16) calls “…wildly

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differing figures…” in their word counts. Laufer and Goldstein (2004, p. 399) observes that even the vocabulary tests researchers may come up with are “…contingent upon the test designer’s definition of a word.” The challenge of defining the construct ‘word’ with precision has plagued both L1 and L2 contexts as observed by Gardner (2007, p. 245) who says:

The definition of what constitutes a word for counting purposes and potential learning purposes has also been the subject of extensive debate in L1 and L2 instructional contexts for quite some time (Anderson and Freebody, 1981; Anderson and Nagy, 1992; Bauer and Nation, 1993; Hazenberg and Hulstijn, 1996; Goulden et al. 1990; Nagy and Anderson, 1984; Wesche and Paribakht, 1996).

Literature on lexical frequency measures acknowledges the divergence in the conceptualisation of the construct ‘word’ for counting purposes (Read & Chappelle, 2001; Nation, 2001; Milton, 2009) which necessitates the operationalization of the construct ‘word’ in the present study. Gardner (2007, p. 242) views the definition of the construct ‘word’ for counting and analysis purposes as the greatest challenge besetting corpus-based vocabulary research. He further notes that what compounds the challenge is “… the additional concern of whether researcher-based conceptualizations of word (i.e. the criteria used to group words, count words, etc.) actually match the psychological realities of Word (i.e. actual knowledge of or about words in the minds of target language users).” This becomes a validity concern. Any sound definition of word should ensure that word forms which are considered the same word by the word definition or unit of counting are registered in the mind and acquired by learners as the same word. What follows then, is an appraisal of the four current conceptualisations of the construct ‘word’ namely; word as a token, as a type, as a lemma, and as a word family. The inappropriateness of each of these constructs for use in the present study is discussed and the perspective of ‘word’ adapted for the present study is discussed and reasons for its use advanced.

Word as Token

The most general use of the notion of ‘word’ is as a token. Carter’s (1998, p. 4) definition of ‘word’ in Catalán and Francisco (2008, p. 151) as “…any sequence of letters (and a limited number of other characteristics such as hyphen and apostrophe) bounded on either side by a space or punctuation mark” is consonant with the conception of word as token. Conceptualising word as token is the ordinary, more general conception of word. For example, when a research journal instructs authors to limit their manuscript to 6 000 words,

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the unit of word the journal would be referring to is that of word as token. In word as token, each lexical item is regarded as a separate word from any other and is counted as many times as it recurs in a text. Nation (2001) observes that word as token is sometimes referred to as running words in a text. A statement ‘The singer sang a song different from the songs the other singers had sung’ would have 14 word tokens or running words. All the combination of letters standing out as lexically independent units separated from other units by a space would be separate words no matter the number of times they recur.

Conceptualising word as token has no merit in word frequency counts because the same word is counted as a separate form every time it appears in a text which means there can be no determination of the frequency of a word’s appearance in a text. In the 14 token statement above, the first ‘the’ is word number 1, the second is word number 8 and the third is word number 10. One who knows all the words in the statement is considered as knowing 14 words despite the word ‘the’ appearing three times in text bearing the same orthographic constitution or spelling, the same pronunciation and the same meaning in all the appearances. The present study which depended on a computation of word frequencies could therefore, not adopt the definition of word as token. Limitations such as these in the conceptualisation of word as a token could possibly have necessitated the consideration of other word constructs like word as type which are amenable to the generation of frequency counts. The notion of word as a type therefore, merited consideration in the present study.

Word as Type

In conceptualising word as a type, one considers the same word appearing several times as a single word. Tweedie and Baayen (1998, p. 325) say, “[A] word token is an instance of a particular word type.” A word token differs from a word type in that a word is only counted once no matter how many times it recurs in a text. The statement ‘The singer sang a song different from the songs the other singers had sung’ would this time be considered 12 words long because the form ‘the’ would only be counted once. Nation (2001, p. 7) notes that, “We count words in this way if we want to answer questions like ‘How large was Shakespeare’s vocabulary?’ ‘How many words do you need to know to read this book?’ Use of word as type makes two assumptions which can be challenged. First; is the assumption that every individual word is unique and so even words that are derived from another have to be considered as separate words.

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A learner who knows the word ‘girls’ has to demonstrate knowledge of the word ‘girl’ for them to be regarded as knowledgeable about both words. This is unrealistic and is not consistent with how we acquire a language’s vocabulary. We derive meanings of some words from our knowledge of related others. If I am told that a new verb ‘grut’ has been coined, I would not need to be told about the presence of gruts, grutting and grutted. I would know these on the basis of my knowledge of grut. I would also know that one who gruts is a grutter. The perspective of word as token represents a denial of the learning burden principle which Nation (2001) defines as the amount of effort required to learn a new word once a closely related word is known. If every word form was acquired separately, then vocabulary acquisition would be a painfully slow process. The reality, even for beginners, is that learners can recover the meaning of some words from their knowledge of others.

The second assumption in the ‘word as type’ construct is that each form with the same string of letters is one word. Homonyms, which are words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings, would present problems. An overused but apt example of a homonym is ‘bank’. Bank as a financial institution has nothing in common with the bank of a river. It is ironic that word as type would deny ‘girl’ and ‘girls’ same word status but give it to all the variations of the word bank. Some words also function as both nouns and verbs depending on their use and knowledge of a word as a verb does not translate to its knowledge as a noun and vice versa. On the one hand, the type discounts some word forms from being considered as the same word because of a difference in their orthographic identity no matter how small the difference or how close to each other the two forms may be. On the other hand, it considers totally different words like homonyms as one word when they are not related at all in terms of what they signify. Such limitations on the part of the type, and in particular its disregard of the learning burden principle, provided the rationale for the consideration of the lemma unit of counting, which applies the learning burden principle.

Word as Lemma

The conception of word as a lemma considers several words sharing particular characteristics or attributes as one word. Francis and Kučera (1982, p. 1) in Gardner (2007, p. 243-244) define a lemma as ‘a set of lexical forms having the same stem and belonging to the same major word class, differing only in inflection and/or spelling.” From the statement ‘The singer sang a song different from the songs the other singers had sung’ some words would be considered as the same word on account of one being a base form and another being its

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inflected form. Both words, however, have to belong to the same word class. The form singer will be the base form for singers and being both nouns, the two belong to the same lemma and are therefore, considered as one word in the computation of word frequencies. The same holds true for the forms song and songs (both nouns) as well as sang and sung (both verbs from the base form sing). The assumption is that the learning burden between the base form and the inflected form is eliminated or eased considerably if the base form and the grammatical functioning of the morphological inflections are known. If the meaning of a word can just be recovered from that of the other, then the two are actually one, is the thinking behind the learning burden principle. The ‘s’ added to singer and song to come up with singers and songs respectively is an inflection which is just indicative of the same word’s change in grammatical functioning from a singular to a plural form.

The requirement of having members of a lemma sharing the same part of speech means that, in a statement ‘Take the water and water the flowers’, the first water would be considered a different word from the second. Knowing the meaning of water as a noun would not translate to knowing its use as a verb. Browne, Cihi and Culligan (2007, p. 2) endorse the rationale for the constitution of lemmas by arguing that

…statistical item difficulty factors for ‘accept’, ‘accepts’ and ‘accepting’ are very close, whereas the statistical difficulties for ‘acceptable’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘unacceptable’, are all quite different. One hypothesis is that the brain treats these six items as four different Base Words.

Although lemma constitution seems to be a neat, well defined linguistic notion, in practice it is replete with challenges and limitations. Francis and Kučera’s (1982, p. 1) lemma definition accommodates irregular forms within a lemma despite them not being transparent. Examples are forms like went, sought, best and so forth. There is nothing in the orthographic make up or even their pronunciation which suggests that their base forms are go, seek and good. As Gardner (2007, p. 244) observes,

… the case of the irregulars poses serious quandaries relating to the psychological validity of such family relationships—namely, that the opaque spelling and phonological connections between the lemma headword and the family members will surely cause more and different learning problems than their more transparent counterparts.

This defeats the whole learning burden principle for which the lemma was created to address. Writing about the place of irregular forms within a lemma, Nation (2001, p. 8) notes that “[T]he learning burden of these is clearly heavier than the learning burden of regular forms

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like books, runs, talked, washed and fastest.” He questions whether irregular forms should share the same lemma as the base form or should constitute separate lemmas. There appears to be no consensus on the place of irregular forms within a lemma. According to Milton (2009, p. 10) “[A] lemma includes a headword and its most frequent inflections and this process must not involve changing the part of speech from that of the headword.”

The introduction of the qualification, ‘most frequent inflections,’ to the lemmatisation process is an attempt to make the constitution of a lemma less accommodative and more manageable. What criteria to use to determine which inflections are the most frequent can be questioned. Should these be inflections inflecting the bulk of words within a language or should these be inflections inflecting the most used forms? Even what constitutes a headword is not clear. Sinclair (1991) in Nation (2001) questions whether it should be the base form or the most frequent form.

Nation (2001) adds the reduced or contracted ‘n’t’ form to the constituents of a lemma. A close look would show that even the contracted forms do not impose uniform learning burden to warrant having all of them considered the same word as their full forms. There are what I see as transparent contracted forms like do not-don’t, have not-haven’t but there are also opaque contracted forms like will not-won’t, am not-ain’t. It is, therefore, a gross overgeneralization to assume that the contracted form will be known once the full forms are known.

Stubbs (2002) proposes that members of the same lemma should share the same meaning which has the problem of not clearly distinguishing a lemma from a lexeme, since the lexeme also denotes a group of words sharing the same meaning and same word class. An addition of the element of same meaning to the composition of a lemma would make the compilation of lemmas a daunting challenge. Knowles and Mohd Don (2004, p. 71) acknowledge the tremendous difficulty of constituting a lemma and the unconvincing generalisations often emanating from “…generalizations about whole lemma…” and advise researchers to consider “…individual word meanings…” as the basis for their word count and analyses. According to Browne, Cihi and Culligan (2007, p. 2) “…the brain stores and processes lemmas having similar difficulty factors as forms of the same word, and … stores and processes lemmas having different difficulty factors as different words.” The challenge then is to constitute lemmas in the way that the brain recognises, processes and stores word forms as one word.

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The perspective of word as lemma raises more questions than it answers and evidently embraces within its fold several word forms with dissimilar learning burden. These limitations on the part of the lemma necessitated the consideration of the last of the current notions of the construct ‘word’; word as word family.

Word as Word Family

Word as word family is more accommodative of words with diverse features than the lemma. Whereas a lemma is a grouping of words produced through inflectional processes, a word family is a group of words created through word formation processes. A word family is less precisely determined than a lemma is. According to Nation (2001, p. 8), “[A] word family consists of a headword, its inflected forms, and its closely related derived forms.” Word family as a unit of counting is also based on the learning burden principle where words are grouped together into a family if the effort to learn a derivative (word derived from another) is eased by the knowledge of the base word. The word family unit of counting is, however, broader than the lemma in that while it includes all the words in a lemma, it goes further to incorporate some words into the word family of a base word which would not make it into a lemma. In the first instance, the restriction of having words belong to the same part of speech as the base does not apply. Words traversing word classes can gain membership in the same word family. In the statement ‘The singer sang a song different from the songs the other singers had sung’, the forms singer, sang, song, songs, singers and sung can be part of the same word family and would be considered as one word for word frequency counts. This effectively reduces the number of words in the statement to seven.

Word families have their basis of the understanding that the acquisition of thousands of words is through the application of morphological rules which ensure “…little or no extra learning when one or more of the members is already known to the learner (Chung, 2009, p. 162). For instance, the process of affixation which includes prefixation and suffixation eases the learning of many words. A word family therefore, “… includes a wider range of inflections and derivations…as the basis of word counts” (Milton, 2009, p. 11). A word family formula would thus be, Word Family=Base form +Basic Inflected forms+ Transparent derivatives. Such definition is imprecise because it does not spell out the criteria that qualify some word forms as basic inflected and transparent derivatives. Use of word families as a unit for measuring learners’ vocabulary knowledge makes unwarranted assumptions about learner knowledge and competences. Bauer and Nation (1993) identify the

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kinds of knowledge learners should possess to appreciate the similarities of words falling within the same family. Learners need to be conversant with word bases and recognise them in words, like the relational knowledge between sung and singer emanating from their sharing the same base form, sing.

Bauer and Nation (1993) endorse the need for learners who are knowledgeable about the morphological properties of words, learners who would know that mean does not derive from me despite the orthographic or spelling string for me occurring in mean. Learners should also have some implicit knowledge of the role of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in word formation and word meaning as well as be able to use permissible base-affix combinations in speech and writing. It would be naïve to expect learners, particularly second language learners in the early years of schooling to have such intricate morphological knowledge. This renders the value of word families as units of counting and analyses highly suspect for the present study.

The learning burden of words belonging to the same family may not be as negligible as the construct of word families implies. Nation (2001, p. 8) rightly observes that, “The major problem in counting using word families as the unit is to decide what should be included in a word family and what should not. Learners’ knowledge of the prefixes and suffixes develops as they gain more experience of the language. What might be a sensible word family for one learner may be beyond another learner’s present level of proficiency.” This, according to him necessitates the setting up of a word families incremental scale from “… the most elementary and transparent members and moving on to less obvious possibilities” (p. 8).

Bauer and Nation (1993) came up with seven levels or word family scale based on an analysis of the 1,000,000 token Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpus dealing mainly with affixation. Table 1 presents an adaptation of Bauer and Nation’s (1993, p. 254) scale from the second level to the seventh level of inflections and affixations.

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Table 1: Adaptation of Bauer and Nation's Word Family Scale

Level Affixation and inflection 1 No affixes.

2 -s, -ing,-ed,-er,-est, (all inflections)

3 -able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th, -y, non-, un-, (Most frequent and regular derivational affixes)

4 -al, -ation, -ess, -ful, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ize, -ment, -ous, in- (Frequent, orthographically regular affixes)

5 -age, -al, -ally, -an, -ance, -ant, -ary, -atory, -dom, -eer, -en, -ence,- ent, -ery,- ese,