Abstract Lexical dispersion is typically measured across arbitrary corpus parts of equal size. In this study, we apply DA – a new dispersion index designed for unequal-sized corpus parts – to the British National Corpus (BNC) in a series of cases studies to show that the dispersion of a word is strongly influenced by the corpus units or parts it is measured across. Our results show that dispersion should be measured and interpreted based on corpus units that are linguistically meaningful for a particular research goal. We conclude with recommendations to help researchers select meaningful corpus units for measuring and interpreting lexical dispersion.

中文翻译：

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词法分散与语料库设计

摘要 词法分散通常是跨相同大小的任意语料库部分测量的。在本研究中，我们在一系列案例研究中将 DA——一种为不等大小的语料部分设计的新分散指数——应用于英国国家语料库 (BNC)，以表明一个词的分散受到语料单元或语料库单元的强烈影响。它被测量的部分。我们的结果表明，应该根据对特定研究目标具有语言意义的语料库单元来衡量和解释分散度。我们最后提出了一些建议，以帮助研究人员选择有意义的语料库单元来测量和解释词汇分散。