Frequency or Keyness?

Abstract

The possibility of compiling electronic corpora, as of the second half of the last century, has provided new opportunities for vocabulary research. This has also resulted in the development of a series of computer software solutions for the lexical analysis of texts and the building of vocabulary lists for language learners. In this article, the differences in building technical vocabulary lists according to their frequency and keyness in corpora of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are discussed. Both criteria have been discussed in terms of their benefits and limitations, and the possibilities of the most convenient combination of both. Finally, the word frequency list has been upgraded with keywords to provide a more comprehensive, but still very attainable, word list suitable for building a bilingual glossary or to be extended into a dictionary.