Mean Log Frequency of Dependency Paths
So far we’ve looked at the mean log frequency of lexemes, the mean log frequency of forms, and, after calculating dependency paths or “swords”, the mean dependency depth.
What we haven’t looked at is the mean log frequency of those dependency paths—a rough proxy for a target having common (rather than merely shallow) syntactic structures.
By this measure, the top five (i.e. lowest scoring) books are:
4832 1 Corinthians 4929 3 John 4935 1 John 4938 John 5027 James
and the top 10 chapters are:
4183 1 Corinthians 13 4362 1 Corinthians 9 4386 1 Corinthians 14 4485 Romans 14 4486 John 16 4550 1 John 3 4558 2 Corinthians 11 4564 1 Corinthians 6 4566 1 Corinthians 7 4576 John 7
It is interesting just how much 1 Corinthians features here. The book (and those chapters featured above) do poorly in terms of mean log frequency of lexemes.
If 1 Corinthians is actually syntactically easy to read, I wonder if that’s an argument for having some readings which, because of vocab, need to be heavily footnoted with glosses but which are still worth reading early because of the syntax.