Lexical Richness in Modern Women Writers: Evidence from the Corpus of History English Texts

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of lexical density and its popularity after the arrival of corpus linguistics and its methodology. In fact, this is now one of the most frequently used descriptive tools in the analysis of register and genre. Researchers have often trusted lexical density as it is quantifiable and measurable by applying a formula and this has made its use very popular both for scrutinising grammatical and lexical forms and their frequencies. Lexical richness is a related concept although it does not refer exactly to the same, This paper aims to examine lexical richness, understood as the degree of variety of terms used in texts written by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To this end, I will analyse samples drawn from the Corpus of English History Texts (CHET) to see whether the communicative format (genre) of the sample has any influence on  vocabulary in a discipline with discursive patterns that were not probably as standardised as those of other fields of knowledge.