Learning Vocabulary in another Language

Learning from context and attention-drawing activities

There is some evidence that a combination of attention-drawing activities, such as presenting words
to learners before reading (Jenkins, Stein and Wysocki, 1984) and defining words as they occur in
context (Elley, 1989) increases the amount of vocabulary learning. Swanborn and de Glopper
(1999) in a meta-analysis of 20 studies of learning from context found that the nature of the
vocabulary pre-test affected the amount of words learned. Laufer and Hill (2000) suggest the having
words highlighted in their computerised text probably increased dictionary look-up and therefore
learning. Drawing attention to words increases the chance of them being learned. It is important to
distinguish between the effects of these kinds of activity on vocabulary learning and on
comprehension of the text. Jenkins, Stein and Wysocki (1984) studying young native speakers of
English found no direct effect of preteaching on comprehension, but there was a marked effect on
the learning of the words from context.

Attention-drawing could be done in the following ways.

Drawing attention to the word
pre-testing
pre-teaching
seeing a list before reading
highlighting (colour, bold, italics) in the text
having a list while reading

Providing access to the meaning
glossing
teacher defining through pre-teaching
teacher defining while listening to the text
hyper-text look-up
dictionary look-up

Motivating attention to the word
warning of a test
providing follow-up exercises
noting contexts while reading (e.g. filling in a notebook)

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Several of these methods have been tested in experimental studies, but many have not.

Do glossing and dictionary use help vocabulary learning?

There is now considerable evidence that when learners' attention is drawn towards unfamiliar words
and there is a clear indication of their meaning, vocabulary learning is much greater than when
learners read without deliberately focusing on new vocabulary.

Nist and Olejnik (1995) examined the procedure of meeting a word in context and then looking up
its meaning in the dictionary. They used four different kinds of tests to measure the learning of each
word. They found that there was no interaction between the meeting in context and the looking up
of the word, and that the quality of the dictionary definition determined the quality of learning. Nist
and Olejnik argue that dictionaries can be substantial contributors to the process of vocabulary
learning. Hulstijn=s (1993) study of inferencing and dictionary look-up behaviour found that
learners who were good at inferring preferred to confirm their guesses by consulting a dictionary.
Learners differed greatly in their skill at inferring. There was a modest correlation (.50) between
inferring ability and overall vocabulary size.

Watanabe (1997) compared three forms of vocabulary glossing in texts on second language
learners' vocabulary learning. The three forms of glossing were 1) inserting a brief explanation of
the word in the text immediately after the word (Bramki and Williams, 1984, call this "lexical
familiarization"), 2) glossing the word in the margin "[crib = baby's bed]", and 3) providing
two-choice multiple-choice glosses in the margin. Hulstijn (1992) has suggested that
multiple-choice glosses supplement contextual information, encourage mental effort by having to
choose, and avoid incorrect inferences by providing a meaning. Glossing appeared to improve
comprehension. The two conditions involving glosses in the margin of the text resulted in higher
scores in the immediate and delayed post-tests compared to providing the meaning in the text and
having no glosses or meaning provided in the text.

Learning from the single gloss treatment was higher than the multiple-choice gloss treatment in all
post-tests but not significantly so. The slightly lower scores for multiple-choice may have come
from learners making the wrong choice. Glossing almost doubled the learning (17 words) compared
to learning from the text with no glosses or lexical familiarization (10 words).

Mondria and Wit-de-Boer (1991) used specially constructed, isolated sentences to investigate

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second language learners' learning from context. The experience involved three stages: 1) a
guessing stage where the context sentences were shown and learners guessed the translation of the
target words, 2) a learning stage where the learner saw the correct translations of the target words
and had to learn them, and 3) a testing stage where the learners saw the words in new
non-informative contexts and had to translate them. It seems that the testing stage immediately
followed the learning stage. Mondria and Wit-de Boer found no relationship between success at
guessing and retention. It is likely that the learning stage overwhelmed the effects of guessing.

Formats for testing or practising guessing

Researchers have used a variety of formats for testing or practising guessing. These range from
fixed deletion cloze procedure where the missing item is a blank, to unaltered texts where learners
guess words with the real word form present.

There are several factors that need to be considered when deciding on a format for guessing.

1. The effect of the word form. Several studies (Bensoussan and Laufer, 1983; Laufer and Sim,
1985b) have shown that learners are often influenced by the actual form of the word. If the
word resembles a known word, the form may lead them to a wrong guess. If the form contains
familiar parts, then these may be used to guide the guess. One of the most difficult things to
learn when becoming proficient at guessing is to let the context rather than the form guide the
guess. Formats which use a blank remove this distraction. This may be useful at the early
stages of developing a guessing strategy but it is important at some stage that learners get
practice in suspending form-based guesses while they use the context to guess. When learners'
guessing skill is tested, it is useful to see if they have control of this aspect of the strategy. It
may also be useful to see if learners can deal with homographs when a different member is
known.

2. Previous knowledge of the word to be guessed. When testing the guessing skill, it is necessary
to be sure that the learners do not already know the word that is to be guessed. One way of
solving this problem is to replace the words to be guessed with nonsense words. This then
means that any answer is truly a guess. Leaving blanks also achieves this purpose. However,
there are several context clues that are available for known words that are not available for
unknown words. These clues make guessing easier and not representative of guessing truly
unknown words. For example, there are Ames's (1966) clues of familiar expressions

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(collocations) "Who spends one evening a week thacing the fat with the boys?" Because the
collocation is known, the word is easily guessed, but if "chewing the fat" was not known
before, then it would not be guessable.

There are thus two kinds of previous knowledge to consider: the knowledge of the form itself,
and the collocational, grammatical knowledge. Using nonsense words deals with the problem
of knowledge of the form but it does not deal with the other kinds of knowledge. The validity
of Ames's (1966) study is thus severely compromised by not taking account of this kind of
knowledge.

3. The density of unknown words and the size of the context. An important factor affecting
success at guessing is the ratio of known words to unknown words. Liu and Nation (1985)
suggest that a ratio of 1 unknown to 24 known is needed for successful guessing. That is, at
least 95% of the words in the text must be familiar to the reader. If the density of unknown
words is too great then learners do not have a chance to show their guessing skill.

Guessing could be tested or practised with isolated sentences or with continuous text. As we
have seen, it seems that only a small proportion of the clues needed for guessing occur outside
the sentence containing the unknown word. It thus may be acceptable for practicality reasons
to practise or test some guessing in isolated sentences. However, at some stage in a learner=s
development of the guessing strategy it is important that the few clues from the wider context
are given attention.

4. The types of words that are guessed. Words that represent unfamiliar concepts are more
difficult to guess than words that represent known concepts (Nagy, Anderson and Herman,
1987). It is likely, especially for second language learners, that the majority of words to be
guessed represent known concepts. However, some, especially technical words, will also
require learners to develop new concepts. Second language learners in their later meetings
with words in context will also need to see distinctions between the second language word
and the nearest first language equivalent. When testing the guessing skill it is thus important
to see if learners are able to deal with unfamiliar concepts.

The different parts of speech are not equally represented at the various frequency levels.
There tend to be more nouns among the lower frequency words, for example. If a true
measure of the learners' guessing skill is needed, it is important that the kinds of words to be
guessed represent the kinds of words that a learner with a given vocabulary size would need

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to guess. A strength of Ames's (1966) study was that he tried to get a representative sample of
words to guess by using a cloze procedure. Unfortunately he did not take the vocabulary size
of his learners into account and so did not restrict his sample to words outside their level of
vocabulary knowledge.

It should be clear from the discussion of these four factors affecting guessing from context that the
validity of a practice or testing format for guessing from context would be enhanced if the actual
word form appeared in the context, the learners did not already know the word, there was a low
density of unknown words, the unknown words were in a continuous text, and the unknown words
were typical of those a learner of that vocabulary size would meet. This is the ideal and for a variety
of reasons, many of them related to pedagogical, reliability and practicality issues, other formats
have been used. Table 7.3 lists the possibilities.

TABLE 7.3. FEATURES OF FORMATS FOR TESTING OR PRACTISING GUESSING

Word form

a blank space instead of the word
a nonsense word
a real word

Selection of words and contexts

real randomly sampled contexts
real selected contexts
contrived contexts

Size and relationship of contexts

isolated sentence contexts
isolated paragraph contexts
continuous text contexts

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When practising and testing guessing from context it may be effective to draw on a variety of
formats to focus attention on particular aspects of the guessing skill.

Dunmore (1989) reviewed exercise types in five different course books for practising guessing from
context and found four major exercise types.

1. Matching a given synonym with a word in the text.
2. Filling a blank with a suitable word.
3. Providing words before reading and then seeing if the learner can use context to find the

meanings of the words.
4. Developing awareness of text features that could help guessing.

Dunmore is critical of the various exercise types because they tend to test rather than train guessing,
and encourage a belief that synonyms are sufficient to express the meanings of unknown words.
This last criticism may be a little harsh as finding a first language translation or a second language
synonym may be a reasonable first approximation of the meaning of a word.

Steps in the guessing-from-context strategy

There is no one procedure for guessing from context, but most procedures draw on the same kinds
of clues. Some procedures work towards the guess in an inductive approach. Others work out
deductively from the guess, justifying the guess. A deductive approach is more suited to younger
learners who will be less analytical in their approach and to advanced learners who are familiar with
the various clues and wish to concentrate on developing fluency in guessing. An inductive
approach, such as that described by Clarke and Nation (1980) is useful for making learners aware of
the range of clues available and for developing the sub-skills that may be needed to make use of the
clues.

The aim of all guessing procedures is to help learners become fluent and skillful at guessing from
context so that the guessing does not interrupt the normal flow of reading too much.

Let us look first at Clarke and Nation=s (1980) five-step procedure. Further discussion of it can be
found in Nation (1990) and Nation and Coady (1988).

Step 1: Decide on the part of speech of the unknown word.

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Step 2: Look at the immediate context of the word, simplifying it grammatically if necessary.

Step 3: Look at the wider context of the word, that is the relationship with adjoining sentences or
clauses.

Step 4: Guess.

Step 5: Check the guess.
Is the guess the same part of speech as the unknown word?
Substitute the guess for the unknown word. Does it fit comfortably into the context?
Break the unknown word into parts. Does the meaning of the parts support the guess?
Look up the word in the dictionary.

This procedure is strongly based on language clues and does not draw on background content
knowledge. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, linguistic clues will be present in every context,
background clues will not. This procedure aims at being as generalizable as possible. Secondly,
using background knowledge as the main source of information is likely to result in less vocabulary
learning than the more system-focused sources of information.

The procedure moves from a narrow focus on the word in Step 1 to a broader view in Step 3. Van
Parreren and Schouten-van Parreren (1981) suggest that there are various levels of information with
the grammar level being lower than the meaning level. The higher meaning level can only be used
if the lower grammar level does not cause problems. Making a guess involves choosing the
appropriate level at which to seek information and moving to another level if this proves to be the
wrong one (van Parreren and Schouten-van Parreren, 1981: 240).

The first step in Clarke and Nation=s procedure encourages the learner to focus on the unknown
word and ensures that the right word is focused on. Note that word-part analysis does not occur at
this step. Arriving at a correct guess from word-part analysis is less sure than using context clues.
Getting learners to delay using word-part clues is the most difficult thing to learn when developing
skills in guessing from context.

The second step looks at the immediate context, that is the clause containing the unknown word.
This source of information will contain most of the clues needed to guess most words correctly.
Sometimes the immediate context is difficult to interpret because it is in the form of a passive with

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a missing agent, because the subject and verb are separated by a relative clause or through
nominalisation, or pronouns are present which need to be interpreted. Learners can practise
clarifying the immediate context by unpacking nominalizations, turning the passive construction
into an active one, and by interpreting reference words. There is an exercise called AWhat does
what?@ which gives this practice. Here is an example of the exercise applied to a text. The exercise
is very easy to prepare. The teacher chooses an appropriate text, preferably with line numbers. The
teacher then writes the line number and word and the learners have to ask AWhat does what?@
about the word. In the example below, the AWhat does what?@ questions have been added to clarify
the procedure. Usually the learners will have to make the questions themselves. More information
on AWhat does what?@ can be found in Nation (1979).

We live in a style that most of our grandparents could not even have imagined. Medicine has
cured diseases that terrified them. Most of us live in better and more spacious homes. We eat
more, we grow taller, we are even born larger than they were. Our parents are amazed at the
matter-of-fact way we handle computers. We casually use products - microwave ovens,
graphite tennis rackets, digital watches - that did not exist in their youth. Economic growth
has made us richer than our parents and grandparents. But economic growth and technical
change, and the wealth they bestow, have not liberated us from scarcity. Why not? Why,
despite our immense wealth, do we still have to face costs? (Parkin, 1990: Chapter 3)

Who imagines what?
What terrifies who?
Who produces what?
What did not exist?
What grows?
What bestows what?
What liberates who?

The third step involves looking at the wider context. A conjunction relationship activity can be used
to practise this part of the procedure. In this activity, the learners have to see what joining word can
be put between the clause containing the unknown word and the adjoining clauses. Sometimes the
relationship will already be marked by a conjunction, adverbial or some other sign of the
relationship, but these will still have to be interpreted. Learners can be helped with this by having a
list of prototypical conjunction relationship markers as in the left-hand column of Table 7.4. The
learners may need to become familiar with the kinds of information that each of these markers
provide which is outlined in the right-hand column of the table, and they need to know the range of

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words that signal these relationships.
TABLE 7.4. CONJUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS AND THEIR MEANING

Prototypical Other markers The meaning of the relationship between the
marker clauses

and furthermore, also, in addition, The classes joined together are in a list and

similarly ... share similar information.

but however, although, nevertheless, The clauses are in contrast to each other.

yet ... One may be negative and the other positive.

They may contain opposing information.

then next, after, before, when, first ... The clauses are steps in a sequence of
events. They might not be in the order in
which they happened.

because thus, so, since, as a result, so One clause is the cause and the other is the
that, in order to, if ... effect.

for example e.g., such as, for instance ... The following clause is an example of the
preceding more general statement, or the
following clauses describe the general
statement in more detail.

or nor, alternatively ... The clauses are choices and they will share

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similar information.

in other that is (to say), namely ... The following clause has the same meaning
words as the preceding clause.

in short to sum up, in a word ... The following clause summarizes what has
gone before.

instead rather than, on the contrary The following clause excludes what has just
been said. That is, it has the opposite
meaning.

See Nation (1979, 1984, 1990: Appendix 6) and Halliday and Hasan (1967) for further information
on conjunction relationships.

Learners can practise this step by interpreting the relationship between pairs of sentences in a text.
This is usefully done by learners working in pairs or small groups initially.

Step 4 is the guess - the moment of truth. When this is done as a class activity, the teacher can
award percentage points for the guesses with a 100% (or 110%) for a fully correct guess, 90% for a
very good guess, 80% for a guess that comes close to the meaning and so on. This is not the last
step.

The fifth step involves checking the guess to see if it is on the right track. Comparing the part of
speech of the guess with the part of speech decided on at Step 1 makes sure that the learner is
focusing on the unknown word. Sometimes incorrect guesses are simply the meaning of an
adjoining word. The second way of checking, substitution, makes sure that the context has been
considered, because the word will not fit if it has not been considered.

The third way of checking involves word part analysis. This is looked at in detail in Chapter 8. This
comes at this stage to make sure that the learner does not twist the interpretation of the context on

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the basis of what the word looks like. Laufer=s (1988, 1991) study of synforms shows that this is a
very common problem. The learner analyses the word parts and sees if the meaning of the parts
relates to the guess. If they do, the learner can feel happy. Looking up the word in a dictionary is the
last way of checking. It should be easy to choose the appropriate meaning from the dictionary if
several meanings are listed there, because the guess will have given a good indication of which one
to choose.

The deductive procedure (see, for example, Bruton and Samuda, 1981) involves the following
steps:

Step 1 : Guess the meaning of the word
Step 2 : Justify the guess using a variety of clues
Step 3 : Readjust the guess if necessary

The advantage of this procedure is that it places the guess at the forefront of the activity and allows
for intuition to play a part. It also works well as a group and class activity.

The learners need not follow a rigid procedure when guessing but they should be aware of the range
of possible clues and should have the skills to draw on them.

Training learners in the strategy of guessing from context

Guessing from context is a complex activity drawing on a range of skills and types of knowledge. It
is worth bearing in mind that it is a subskill of reading and listening and depends heavily on
learners= ability to read and listen with a good level of proficiency. Learning a complex guessing
strategy will not adequately compensate for poor reading or listening skills and low proficiency.
Developing these reading and listening skills is the first priority.

When learners are given training in guessing from context, they should work with texts where at
least 95% of the running words are familiar to them. This will allow them to have access to the
clues that are there. In addition, the words chosen for guessing should be able to be guessed. Not all
words have enough clues, adjectives are usually difficult to guess because they enter into few
relationships with other words, while nouns and verbs are usually easier.

Training in guessing should be given plenty of time. In a pre-university course, it could be practised

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three or four times a week for about ten minutes each time for at least six weeks, and preferably
longer. The aim of the practice is to get learners guessing quickly without having to deliberately go
through all the steps. Fraser (1999) found that making learners familiar with the strategies of ignore,
consult (a dictionary), and infer involving about eight hours of instruction, resulted in a decrease in
the amount of ignoring and an increase in the amount of inferring. The success rates were over 70%
for consulting a dictionary and inferring from context if partially correct inferences were included.
A further eight hours of instruction on linguistic context clues may have helped maintain the
success rate of inferring especially for inferring where learners created a paraphrase for the meaning
of the unknown word.

The training can involve the class working together with the teacher, group work, pair work, and
then individual work. The training can focus on the subskills of determining part of speech, doing
AWhat does what?@, interpreting conjunction relationships, and doing word part analysis. The
training should also involve going through all the steps, gradually getting faster and faster. The
teacher can model the procedure first, gradually handing over control to the learners. Learners can
report on guessing that they did in their outside reading and listening and others can comment on
their attempts. There can be regular guessing from context tests using isolated sentences and
corrected texts. Learner improvement on these tests can be recorded as a means of increasing
motivation.

Teachers should be able to justify the time and effort spent on the guessing strategy to themselves,
their learners and other teachers. These justifications could include:

1. The value of the strategy for both high frequency and low frequency words

2. The fact that the strategy accounts for most vocabulary learning by native speakers

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3. The enormous number of words that can be dealt with and perhaps learned through this
strategy

4. The effectiveness of the strategy
5. The benefits of the strategy in contributing to reading and listening comprehension
6. The fact that learners differ widely in their control of this skill, and training can narrow

these differences
7. The need for this skill in dictionary use.
Teachers should also be able to look critically at the various activities suggested for improving
guessing (Honeyfield, 1977b; Dunmore, 1989).
In any list of vocabulary learning strategies, guessing from context would have to come at the
top of the list. Although it has the disadvantages of being a form of incidental learning (and
therefore less certain) and of not always being successful (because of lack of clues), it is still the
most important way that language users can increase their vocabulary. It deserves teaching time
and learning time. A well planned vocabulary development programme gives spaced, repeated
attention to this most important strategy.
In the following chapter we will look at the strategies of using word parts, using dictionaries, and
using word cards.

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8 Word study strategies

This chapter looks at the word study strategies of using word parts, dictionary use, and using
word cards. These are all intentional approaches to vocabulary learning and fit within the strand
of language focused learning.

Word parts

Most of the content words of English can change their form by adding prefixes or suffixes. These
affixes are typically divided into two types - inflectional and derivational. The inflectional
affixes in English are all suffixes. They include -s (plural), -ed, -ing, -s (3rd person singular), -s
(possessive), -er (comparative), -est (superlative). Unlike most derivational suffixes, inflections
do not change the part of speech of the word or word group they are attached to, and are added
after a derivational suffix if the word has one.

Derivational affixes in English include prefixes and suffixes. Most of the derivational suffixes
and a few prefixes change the part of speech of the word they are added to (happy (adjective) -
happiness (noun); able (adjective) - enable (verb)). Some of the affixes, especially prefixes, also
alter the meaning of the word in a substantial way (judge - prejudge; happy - unhappy; care -
careless). Words which contain affixes are sometimes called complex words.

Researchers on the vocabulary growth of native speakers of English, usually distinguish three
main ways in which a learner's vocabulary increases - through being taught or deliberately
learning new words, through learning new words by meeting them in context, and through
recognizing and building new words by gaining control of the prefixes and suffixes and other
word building devices. In this chapter we look at the extent to which word building affects
vocabulary size, the psychological reality of the relationship between inflected and derived
words and their stem form, and the teaching and learning options for gaining control of English

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word building processes.

A knowledge of affixes and roots has two values for a learner of English. It can be used to help
the learning of unfamiliar words by relating these words to known words or to known prefixes
and suffixes, and it can be used as a way of checking whether an unfamiliar word has been
successfully guessed from context.

Is it worthwhile learning word parts?

One way to answer this question is to approach it in the same way we have approached the
learning of vocabulary, that is, from the point of view of cost\benefit analysis. Is the effort of
learning word parts repaid by the opportunity to meet and make use of these parts?

There are numerous studies of English affixes. Some have attempted to calculate the proportion
of English words originating from Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and other sources
(Grinstead, 1924; Roberts, 1965; Bird, 1987 and 1990). Their studies relate to affixation because
a large proportion of the words coming from Latin or Greek make use of affixes. Other studies
(Nagy and Anderson, 1984; White, Power and White, 1989) look at the proportion of words with
affixes in a particular corpus. Other studies (Thorndike, 1941; Stauffer, 1942; Bock, 1948;
Harwood and Wright, 1956; Becker, Dixon and Anderson-Inman, 1980; Bauer and Nation, 1993)
give the frequency of particular affixes within a corpus. They all confirm the frequent,
widespread occurrence of derivational affixes. White, Power and White's (1989) study of the
four prefixes un-, re-, in-, dis- found that approximately 60% of words with those prefixes could
be understood from knowing the commonest meaning of the base word. Allowing for help from
context and knowledge of the less common meanings of the prefixes, approximately 80% of
prefixed words could be understood.

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Studies of the sources of English vocabulary

Bird (1987 and 1990) after a careful and detailed analysis of the 7,476 word type entries in the
ranked vocabulary list of items with a frequency of 10 per million and above in the LOB corpus
(Johansson and Hofland, 1989) concluded that 97% of these words were derived from
approximately 2,000 roots. He found, as Roberts (1965) did, that the most frequent one thousand
words of English contain around 570 words of Germanic origin, but thereafter the Germanic
words drop to around 360 per thousand. The words derived from French and Latin make up 36%
of the first 1000 and thereafter about 51% (see Table 8.1).

Some of these parts that Bird (1987) analysed have a form that does not change in different
words, such as -ness. Many of the others require considerable imagination and effort to see a
connection, for example, CAP(UT) = Ahead@ which occurs in capital, cap, cape, escape, cattle,
chapel, chief, achieve.

Bird's figures roughly parallel the findings of Roberts (1965) and Grinstead (1924) with words of
Germanic origin predominating in the first 1000 and Italic and Hellenic words predominating
from the second 1000 onwards, averaging around 60% of English vocabulary.

TABLE 8.1. SOURCES OF THE MOST FREQUENT 7,476 WORDS OF ENGLISH (FROM
BIRD, 1987)

1st 100 1st 1000 2nd 1000 from then on

Germanic 97% 57% 39% _ 36%

Italic 3% 36% 51% _ 51%

Hellenic 0 4% 4% _ 7%

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Others 0 3% 6% _ 6%

Studies of the proportions of affixed words

Nagy and Anderson's (1984) study of the word families in a section of the list based on the
American Heritage Corpus (Carroll, Davies and Richman, 1971) is a classic of its kind. Their
goal was to see how many word families the sample, and by extrapolation all printed school
English, contained. To find this they classified the formally related words in their sample into
word families using a scale of meaning relatedness. In doing the classification, they carefully
distinguished the different types of word family members. Table 8.2 presents some of their data
for types involving affixes.

TABLE 8.2. PERCENTAGE OF INFLECTED AND DERIVED TYPES IN A CORPUS OF
TEXTS

Suffixation 7.6%

Prefixation 4.0%

Derived proper names 1.2%

Total derived forms 12.8%

Regular inflections 16.9%

Irregular inflections 0.3%

Inflections with proper names 4.7%

Total inflections 21.9%

Table 8.2 shows that 21.9% (roughly one-fifth) of the different types in a written text are
inflected and 12.8% (roughly one-eighth) have a derivational affix.

Table 8.3 shows how affixation affects the membership of a typical word family.

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TABLE 8.3. THE BASE AND AFFIXED MEMBERS OF A TYPICAL WORD FAMILY

Word type Inclusive definition Only closely Examples

related items

Base word 1.00 1.00 think sure

Regular inflections 1.90 1.16 thinks, thinking surer, surest

Irregular inflections 0.70 0.20 thought

Transparent derivatives 2.57 1.57 thinker, unthinking surely,

ensure

Less transparent derivatives 1.65 unthinkable surety, assure

Other minor variations 1.46 0.89 t=ink Sure

Total types in a family 7.64 4.66

"Other minor variations" includes alternate spellings and pronunciations, capitalisation,
truncations and abbreviations.

Table 8.3 gives average figures for the affixed members of a word family. One set of figures uses
an inclusive flexible definition of what can be in a family including less transparent derivatives
such as visual - visualize, percent - percentile, fend - fender. The other definition is more
exclusive allowing only very transparently related family members. The figures for each
category of word type in the two columns differ because in the column for AOnly closely related
items@, the less transparent derivatives would be considered as base words with their own set of
family members, and thus the total number of word families is much greater for the same number
of types, and so the average is smaller.

For each base form there are on average between one and a half to four derived forms depending
on whether the inclusive or more strict definition of a family is used.

The evidence of the origins of English words and analysis of word forms in a corpus show that
word parts are a very common and important aspect of English vocabulary.

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