Comparing Lexical Bundles across Corpora of Different Sizes: The Zipfian Problem

Formulaic sequences in language use are often studied by means of the automatic identification of frequently recurring series of words, often referred to as ‘lexical bundles’, in corpora that contrast different registers, academic disciplines, etc. As corpora often differ in size, a critically important assumption in this field states that the use of a normalized frequency threshold, such as 20 occurrences per million words, allows for an...