Page 43 - Cyberculture and New Media

34 Formalisms of Digital Text
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pronoun usage in blogs and emails lies ostensibly somewhere between both.
This is intriguing, but it is worth cautioning that pronoun usage may belong
more to specific kind of content than to the intrinsic structure of how
communication in media takes place. Nevertheless, given this instinctive
hypothesis and caveat, comparative statistics on pronoun usage are presented
here without firm conclusion, should they prove helpful for future linguistic
investigations in new media.
Finally, lexical density, the opposite of redundancy in language, is
an indicator of the percentage of words in a text that are unique, that is, not
repeated in it. The lower the lexical density, the greater the verbal
redundancy and therefore the presumed ease of comprehension. The formula
for calculating the lexical density D for any text is

D = (U/N)* 100

where U represents the number of unique words in a text sample,
and N is its total word count. Lexical density is more than a statistical
number; it confirms a principle of information theory that claims that
redundancy in a message boosts its comprehension. As a cheeky example, let
us imagine that you want to learn a dialectical kind of Spanish, Cuban street
argot, one word at a time. Today’s word is astilla, a noun that translates to
splinter, although the slang means something completely different. With a
single utterance, you might or might not guess the slang term’s denotation:

Use astilla for dinner.

The lexical density of this utterance is 100%, in that 4 out of the 4
words are unique. In the next lesson, the key phrase becomes

Use astilla for dinner. use astilla for payment.

This utterance, with 5 out of 8 unique words has lower (63.%)
lexical density, reflecting the possibility that its redundancy boosts its
potential comprehension, and the student of that word may now have some
feasible ideas as to the slang meaning of astilla. Finally the third phrase:

Use astilla for dinner, use astilla for payment, use astilla for purchases.

This new utterance now has only 6 unique words out of 12, or 50%
lexical density, and its increased redundancy supports the possible conjecture
that astilla translates to money. In this sense, comparative measures of lexical
density would, with Westby’s and Rubin’s research corroborate or disprove
the claim that orality emphasizes familiar words as well as repetitive syntax