This radio show by Michael Rosen revolves around the most common words used in the English language today.
Joined by Dr Laura Wright, linguist at Cambridge University, they speak about the issue. From the conversation, it is gathered that the most common words used are: the, be, to, of, and, with, I, you and have. It is clear that there are no nouns included, and few verbs.
They are later joined by Jonathan Culpeper from the University of Lancaster. It is apparent that we don't even realise that we say the most commonly used words, because it is programmed in our brains so much that we don't have to think about it any more. Another important point discussed is that the inbuilt sexism of language is shown with the word counts of lexis in English. 'He' is the 16th most commonly used, 'His' is 23rd and 'She' is only 30th in the list. This underlines the fact that sexism is even present in the language we use.
Another point discussed is that we have grammatical words and content words in our language. Grammatical words are the small and useful words which act as a glue to how we form sentences. Whereas content words are the ones which have meanings. They talk about the fact that 'Google' won't even pay attention to the grammatical words, just the content words.
Jonathan speaks about the word frequency units that he counted for pop songs. The most popular grammatical words were 'I', 'me' and 'my' whereas the content words were 'love', 'make', 'baby', 'alone', 'rain' and 'sad'. This implies that artists are very ego-centric and also speak a lot about romance.
One of the final topics they talk about is how technology allows us to make words frequency lists (like the lists above.) The ever growing world that we live in is developing and so this means that we can make statistical comparisons between the language used for different purposes. This means that we can track social attitudes, much like a lot of companies do nowadays.
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