H. Thorndikeand his empirical approach

The American scientist H. Thorndikewas the first to raise the problem of the lexical minimum selection (The Teacher’s Wordbook of 30,000 words). With this purpose Thorndike analysed various sources: the Bible, newspapers, letters, stories, etc. All selected words were examined only from the point of view of their graphical shape, i.e. only the graphical form of a word, not its meaning, was taken into consideration. This criterion became the major disadvantage of Thorndike’s frequency word lists. His dictionary presented words in alphabetical order. Each word in the list was marked with two figures: the first number indicated word frequency, the second one – the number of sources the word occurred in. Thorndike’s dictionary cannot be considered scientifically selected, for literary sources of selection were limited both in number and character (some of them were of purely idealistic and religious character).

The procedure of word selection presupposes the following two main questions to be solved: 1) determining the item of selection; 2) working out the principles of selection.

Thorndiketook graphic implementation of a word as an item of selection. All grammatical forms of a word were taken as separate words whereas various meanings of the word in context were not taken into consideration. This purely mechanical approach to word selection resulted in distortion of real word frequency in context.

14.2.2. H. Palmerand his ‘erg’

Harold Palmermade the next step towards the scientifically based vocabulary selection. H. Palmer selected 3,000 words and phraseological units. He published his dictionary and his criteria of word selection in 1936 under the title of ‘Interim Report of Vocabulary Selection ’. Paying great attention to selecting words in combinations, he proposed an ‘erg(on)’ as an item of selection. He understood ‘ergs’ as not only separate words, but as their combinations as well. H. Palmer believed that such word combinations should be rightly connected semantic units carrying independent meaning or shades of meaning.

The main merit of H. Palmer’s dictionary is that he regarded words not only from the point of view of the graphic form but also took into account their meaning. Thus, the word ‘like’ is presented in his dictionary as two different words: first in the meaning of ‘to be fond of something’ and then in the meaning of ‘to be similar’. On the other hand, the main inconvenience of H. Palmer’s ‘erg’ as an item of selection lies in the fact that language signs of different levels are given under one and the same heading.

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