Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1Processing Vocabulary Data
- Part 2Measuring Lexical Variation, Sophistication and Originality
- Part 3Estimating Vocabulary Size
- Part 4Measuring Lexical Access
- Part 5Assessing Aptitude for L2 Vocabulary Learning
- Part 6Modelling Vocabulary Growth
- Envoi
- Author Index
- Subject Index
4 - Lexical Signatures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2026
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1Processing Vocabulary Data
- Part 2Measuring Lexical Variation, Sophistication and Originality
- Part 3Estimating Vocabulary Size
- Part 4Measuring Lexical Access
- Part 5Assessing Aptitude for L2 Vocabulary Learning
- Part 6Modelling Vocabulary Growth
- Envoi
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Introduction
This chapter describes two programs that together make up the Lexical Signatures suite. Part 1 describes V_LexSig and Part 2 is devoted to SigSorter.
Part 1. V_LexSig v1.0
V_LexSig is a small utility program that takes as input two data sources. The first is a set of target words (this list will normally be a short list of 8–12 target words which are of interest to the researcher). The second data source is a text which may contain some of the target words or not. The program returns a binary description of the text in terms of the target word list. So, for example, if your target word list consisted of:
planning permission erect dwelling building house controlled council consent forest
and the text to be analysed is:
The real question, one that nobody seemed to be asking, was what were the bears doing in the wood in the first place? It was obvious that the house in the woods had been built without planning permission. The wood was an officially designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and all new building in an area of that sort was very carefully controlled. You couldn't just build a house there. My! you couldn't even build a wooden shed there, let alone a whole house. And if you did build a house, then you were supposed to make sure that it conformed with the special guidance on building that the Council had issued only last year. Vernacular architecture. That was the word. And this house was definitely not in the approved vernacular style ...
then V_LexSig will return a string of binary digits that looks like this:
1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0
This coding tells us that the text contains the words planning, permission, building, house, controlled and council, but not the other words on the target word list.
The binary coding provides a very compact and economical way of describing texts, and allows us to easily identify the lexical similarities and differences between them.
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- Tools for Researching Vocabulary , pp. 66 - 83Publisher: Multilingual MattersFirst published in: 2026
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