The purpose of this booklet is to help define a simple quantitative measure for the vocabulary richness of homogeneous texts. In addition, this measure must also have a variance in order to be used to compare texts with each other.
              A large set of 1,140 different poems, written in English by 177 poets over a period of time from Shakespeare's time to the present, has been collected from a number of Internet sources. The poems included in the sample ranged in length (N) from 41 words to 4,961 words.
              It was found that the well–known Lambda indicator has a certain dependence on the length of the text, although the slope of the model line is very small. The new W indicator (from Wilson), also based on ARC length of the text (L), behaves even better, seeming to have virtually no dependence on N.
              Each poem was analysed separately using AQLA (Altmann Quantitative Linguistics Analyser), a new online tool that is able to calculate a series of textual statistics. Currently, the program is able to process texts in English or Romanian, but its extension in other languages is not a problem.

Lidia Vianu

Andrew Wilson & Ioan–Iovitz Popescu. Vocabulary Richness in English Poetry: The Lambda Indicator and Beyond, is formally launched on 30 July 2022, but it is available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address:

You are kindly invited to visit the Contemporary Literature Press website at http://editura.mttlc.ro/. For comments or suggestions, please contact the publisher lidia.vianu@g.unibuc.ro.

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