Lexical Density
What is it? Lexical density measures how much information there is in a text. Lexical density is defined as the number of lexical words (or content words) divided by the total number of words. Lexical words give a text its meaning and provide information regarding what the text is about. Lexical words are simply nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Nouns tell us the subject, adjectives tell us more about the subject, verbs tell us what they do, and adverbs tell us how they do it.
What is it like? Lexical density is often mentioned alongside lexical diversity as a way of analyzing and understanding language. It’s a calculation that takes the number of lexical words and divides them by the total number of words in order to analyze what proportion of the text contains lexical words.
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Example:
We shall first determine the lexical density of an ideal example. Consider the following sentence:
The quick brown fox jumped swiftly over the lazy dog.
When this website calculates lexical density, it identifies each word as either a lexical word or not:
The quick brown fox jumped swiftly over the lazy dog.
The lexical words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs) are italicized.
There are precisely 7 lexical words out of 10 total words. The lexical density of the above passage is therefore 70%.
Non-example: preposition
Nominalization
What is it? In English grammar, nominalization is a type of word formation in which a verb or an adjective (or another part of speech) is used as (or transformed into) a noun. The verb form is nominalize. It is also called nouning.
What is it like? the conversion of a word or phrase into a noun
Sleepiness, a nominalization, comes from sleepy, an adjective.
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Examples:
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Examples of nouns formed from adjectives:
applicability (from applicable)
carelessness (from careless)
difficulty (from difficult)
intensity (from intense)
Examples of nouns formed from verbs:
failure (from fail)
nominalization (from nominalize)
investigation (from investigate)
movement (from move)
reaction (from react)
refusal (from refuse)
Non-examples- nouns not formed by nominalization
Field
What is it? Field (what) is the subject matter of the text
Tenor
What is it? Tenor (who) is the relationship between those involved in the communicative act, e.g. writer and reader, speaker and listener
Mode
What is it? Mode (how) refers to text construction, looking at whether it is based on written or spoken forms of communication
What is it like? mode is how the text is constructed, particularly whether it is written-like or spoken-like. Mode can help students in moving their writing towards being more written-like. Many, many students write texts in a spoken-like manner when formal, academic texts need to be written-like. This is where the complex sentences come in. Written-like texts are more lexically dense.
What is it like? tenor is the relationship between the author and the audience. The relationship between the author and the audience is essential is what words you choose.
Example: For an example, an email to a friend and a book review have very different relationships between the audience and the author.
What is it like? What you are writing or reading about. In a school context, our language choices will vary depending on such matters as the curriculum area and the topic being studied. The language choices we make in science, for example, will be quite different from those made in history.
Examples: A tenor of a person in authority verses the tenor of a conversation between friends.
Non-examples: nouns
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Examples: The subject being butterflies of a nonfiction book
Non-examples: sentence structure
Examples: How the communication is happening; Will the text be spoken or written. Will it be planned or spontaneous. For example, it could be a speech or written article.
Non-examples: parts of speech
