RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

the sentence, as distinct from clearer accentuation of rarer and less wellknown words that are in the main more significant for the messages conveyed. The vardstick used to evaluate the richness ог poverh' of the le\icon is the index of zvord repetition which is the ratio between the number of words in the analysis (111,000) and the nuniber of ‘new*, ’different words (9638). Although it is a function of sample size (since repetition is greater in longer texts), the repetition index reveals differences between different tvpes of statement In lexically richer texts repetition of words is less frequent than in more closed and stereotyped ones which аге sometimes designated as Texically more precise 1 . The index for the TV news is 11.56, which means that for each new word there are 12 repeated words. C omparison with the results of certain other investigations here and abroad shows that somewhat less repetition, that is the use of a somewhat greater stock of words, could be expected, from the TV News, as a thematically broad-ranging programme. It may be observed, moreover, that in the second уеаг observed the language was a shade poorer than in the first which had a lower index of repetition. Some foreign writers argue that two different tendencies coincide here: a) the speakebs - who attempts to say as much as possible with as few words as possible, and b) the listenebs - who requires more hetereogeneous words in order to better distinguish nuances in the messages and to understand them better. Put in more simplified terms, where there is great use of parts of the general vocabulary (in the sense of frequency) the interests of the speaker are served more than the the interests of the listener. The ratio between new and repeated words is simultaneously an indicator of the diversity of styles which, judging from the findings, is not particularly great Vertical organization of the lexical material in the frequency vocabulary permits conclusions to be drawn on features of the texts through an analysis of the incidence of particular frequency strata. Thus it is known that a great part of a text is made up of structural grammatical words of which there are only