Chapter 1 the study of collocations

iii) Lexical Density 
 
 
A Lexical Density analysis (LD) was also performed by the researcher.  
Lexical Density refers to the number of lexical, or 'open class', words divided by 
 
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the total number of words in each essay and multiplied by 100 (see Long 1991, 
unpublished paper; Linnarud 1986).  For this analysis a number of criteria were 
defined: abbreviations such as 'etc.', 'e.g.' were not counted at all; proper names 
were not counted as lexical words (in Group 1 the students were asked to 
describe themselves and their family, so in each essay there was a considerable 
number of Greek names that did not really contribute to the semantic richness 
of the essay and so they were not considered to be lexical words, see also 
Palmberg 1987:212); names of places in Greece were not counted as lexical 
words (see above); numbers were not counted as  lexical words; adverbs other 
than those ending in -ly were not counted as lexical words; the verb 'do' was 
not counted as a lexical word, even when it was used as a main verb; misspelt 
words that could be easily recognised as English words either in writing or 
when pronounced according to the Greek or English phonetic system were 
counted (in this case it was assumed that the student knew the word and was 
attempting to use it, see also Palmberg 1987:205); words written in Greek were 
not counted at all. 
 
Inter-rater reliability was also obtained for the LD analysis from two 
other raters on 5% of the data, which randomly sampled (i.e. 15 essays), and 
was at 98%.  Each rater was given the same sample of essays that the TLU raters 
were given and an instruction sheet (see Appendix J) and were asked to 
underline the lexical words in each essay.  A short training session was given 
by the researcher on two other essays.  After the raters performed the LD 
analysis on the sample essays, the researcher's and each rater's ratings were 
 
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compared.  There were three instances in which one of the raters had 
underlined the verb "going" as a lexical word in phrases in which it was an 
auxiliary, and as such it was a grammatical rather than a lexical word, e.g. 
essay 37 Group 3 "we are going to do everything".  In one case the adverb 
"hard" was underlined as a lexical word even though it did not end in -ly.  
Finally, words such as "other" and "everybody" were underlined by the raters 
even though they were clearly grammatical words, while there were cases in 
which the raters should have underlined words such as "think", "way", "worst", 
"better", "use", "thanks" but they did not.  Overall, there was agreement 
between the researcher and the raters in the LD analysis in 1264 out of 1280 
lexical words, and the inter-rater reliability was considered sufficient for the LD 
measurement.