Density in spoken and written discourse
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. More precisely, 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.
Other kinds of words such as articles (a, the), prepositions (on, at, in), conjunctions (and, or, but), and so forth are more grammatical in nature and, by themselves, give little or no information about what a text is about. These non-lexical words are also called function words. Auxiliary verbs, such as "to be" (am, are, is, was, were, being), "do" (did, does, doing), "have" (had, has, having) and so forth, are also considered non-lexical as they do not provide additional meaning.
With the above in mind, lexical density is simply the percentage of words in written (or spoken) language which give us information about what is being communicated. With regard to writing, lexical density is simply a measure of how informative a text is.
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 colored green.
There are precisely 7 lexical words out of 10 total words. The lexical density of the above passage is therefore 70%.
Thus, lexical density refers to the ratio of content words (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) to grammatical or function words (e.g. pronouns, prepositions, articles) within a clause.
Spoken discourse is less lexically dense than written discourse. Content words tend to be spread out over a number of clauses, whereas they seem to be tightly packed into individual clauses.
Spoken discourse relies upon context (gestures, etc.)
Semantic density (SD) refers to the degree of condensation of meaning within practices, and may be stronger (+) or weaker (–) along a continuum of strengths. The stronger the semantic density (SD+), the more meanings are condensed within practices; the weaker the semantic density (SD–), the less meanings are condensed. The strength of semantic density characterizing a practice relates to the semantic structure within which it is located. For example, the term ‘gold’ may be commonly understood to denote a bright yellow, shiny and malleable metal used in coinage, jewellery, dentistry and electronics. Within the discipline of Chemistry it may additionally signify such meanings as an atomic number, atomic weight, electron configuration, lattice structure, and much more.
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The semantic density of the knowledge expressed in research publications is likely to be stronger than in textbooks, which in turn may be stronger than in classroom discourse or student work.
A continuum of differences between spoken and written discourse.
Из лекций: Spoken: shorter words and sentences, fewer precise numerical words, more superlative degrees, more repetitions, more interjections, smaller verbal density. Written: greater verbal density, longer words, more terms, more attributed adjectives, more varied vocabulary, more nominalizations, more subordination than coordination, preference for Passive verbs.
Galperin: Spoken: presupposes presence of an interlocutor, the use of contracted forms, certain violations of grammar (don’t instead of doesn’t), colloquial phrases, intensifiers, fill-up words, ellipsis, direct word order in questions, unfinished sentences, lack of linkage between sentences, emotiveness. Written: no interlocutor, more explanatory, explicit (because of the need to describe the context), abundance of connectives, complicated sentence-units, bookish lexis,
Chafe (1982): We found formal written language to differ from informal speaking language by having a large proportion of nominalizations, Genetive subjects and objects, participles, attributive adjectives, conjoined phrases , sequences of prepositional phrases, complement clauses and relative clauses. These are all devices which permit the integration of more material into idea units and devices which serve to distance the language from specific contexts.
Crystal: There are few, perhaps no absolute differences between speech and writing, and there is no single parameter of linguistic variation, which can distinguish all spoken from all written texts. Rather the range of potentially distinguishing linguistic features provides a pool of resources which are used by spoken and written genres in various ways. When we appreciate it, the distinction between speech and writing, far from being obvious and transparent, becomes a complex and intriguing domain of linguistic inquiry.
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Biber, Finnegan: The whole speech-writing dichotomy should be abandoned. Comparisons between those 2 modes should be based on dimensions defined by functional criteria. Considerations of various situations, functional and processing relations across different types of speech and writing override the idea of absolute distinction between spoken and written discourse. There is no simple one-dimensional difference between speech and writing. The most efficient way to present the differences is to present them in a scale.
Это она на лекции раздавала, от супер spoken (telephone conversation) до супер written (official documents)
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