A Usage Measure Based on Psychophysical Relations

A new word usage measure is proposed. It is based on psychophysical relations and allows to reveal words by their degree of "importance" for making basic educational dictionaries. It is accepted to rank words by their absolute (or proportional) frequency, when making a frequency list of text words. The researchers, feeling the imperfection of frequency as an unconditional indicator of word "importance", also take into consideration other usage characteristics for revealing the basic zone of a frequency list, for example the range, i.e. the number of categories, in which the word occurred at least once. However the linear character of the basic dictionary assumes word ranking by only one parameter, and that has resulted in making so-called "distributive" dictionaries, in which words are ranked only by their range (Andreev, 1967, pp. 84–90). Both these approaches can be generalized by the introduction of a certain usage measure M, expressed by the total word frequency F and the range t: