Teacher vs Learner: what corpora can tell us about them

I’ve never been fascinated by corpus linguistics, I understand its extraordinary importance to derive sets of rules, etc. but it never got my interest. However, an experiment based upon The British National Corpus called WordCount did get me thinking. WordCount is a minimalist visual experiment by Jonathan Harris from number27, a belated but great serendipitous discovery. According to Harris, Wordcount presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

(wait a minute, wouldn’t that scale be the precursor of web 2.0 tagging style?)

Of course, guess which word is ranking number 1:

But then I thought, ok, tell me more on ‘teacher’:

Not bad, and now ‘learner’:

(besides…just 1 word from ‘moors’. Let data speak for themselves).

Teacher 1174 - Learner 9586. Any interpretation?

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