{"id":77,"date":"2004-10-15T14:14:51","date_gmt":"2004-10-15T14:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhkssinging.wordpress.com\/2004\/10\/15\/composers-in-the-british-national-corpus\/"},"modified":"2014-09-02T22:34:14","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T22:34:14","slug":"composers-in-the-british-national-corpus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/2004\/10\/15\/composers-in-the-british-national-corpus\/","title":{"rendered":"Composers in the British National Corpus"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have recently come across this<\/a> intriguing graphical representation of the frequency of words in the British National Corpus<\/a>, a corpus of spoken and written British English dating from the early 1990’s. As it includes proper names, I tried various names of composers (the number is the place in the frequency table, low numbers signifying high frequency):
\n
\nMozart 6234
\nBach 11830
\nBeethoven 11942
\nHaydn 20025
\nStravinsky 21886
\nTchaikovsky 22807
\nElgar 23091
\nPurcell 24229
\nSchubert 24638
\nMahler 26589
\nShostakovich 29140
\nDebussy 29336
\nSchoenberg 30784
\nPuccini 41577
\nTippett 43223
\nWebern 47165
\nMessiaen 53446
\n<\/tt>
\nWhat I don’t know is the absolute frequencies and I wonder whether at the less frequent end differences of thousands of places may conceal little or no difference in frequency. I left out some names which could turn up frequently as common nouns or other people’s names (e.g. Strauss (17539), Gibbons (20388), Wagner (11505, though I bet most of these are<\/i> the composer)). Sometimes something named after the composer may inflate their count; I suspect the Tallis Scholars have done this for Tallis (12911) though the Monteverdi Choir has not boosted Monteverdi (34755) very much, and maybe the Purcell School has done it for Purcell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have recently come across this intriguing graphical representation of the frequency of words in the British National Corpus, a corpus of spoken and written British English dating from the early 1990’s. As it includes proper names, I tried various … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[53,89,155,60,110,120,317,141,197,468,165,241,83,136,30,166,467,160,114,140,177,135,139],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2694,"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/2694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}