norm of frequency

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What is norm of frequency count ?

When examining the frequency of features across texts and registers, we think it important to make sure that the counts are comparable. In particular, if the texts in a text are not all the same length, then frequency counts from those texts are not directly comparable. For example, imagine that you analyzed two texts and found that each one has 20 modal verbs. It might be tempting to conclude that modals are equally common in the texts. However. further imagine that the first text has a total length of 750 words , and the second text is 1200 words long in this case, your conclusion would be wrong. Because the second text is longer, therefore more opportunities for modals to occur, and therefore simply comparing the counts does not give an accurate account o fthe relative frequcecies of modals in the two texts.

WordMetry can split the texts to be analyzed into same length. Click menu > File >Chop files will allow you to split any text into any length. The split files are all the same length with extension such as 001, 002, or 003.... You can make full use of this utility to build you own database for further study.

To continue with the example above, the counts in the two texts could be normed to a basis per 1000 words.

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