1. The first part of the assignment is Exercise #1 on p. 98 of the Fromkin and Rodman text It requires you to estimate the size of your "mental lexicon," by checking your knowledge of the words on four sample pages of a "standard" dictionary, and then scaling the result by an estimate of the total number of entries in the dictionary you've chosen.
Feel free to do the task the way that Fromkin and Rodman specify. However, here is a somewhat easier way.
Each time you access this link you'll get a random sample of 100 headwords from a recent Collegiate dictionary, sampled from a list with 78,984 entries overall. If you access this link instead, you'll get a plain text file from the same dictionary instead of an HTML page (for easier cutting and pasting into some word processors).
Each time you access this link you'll get a random sample of 100 headwords from an ancient Unabridged dictionary, sampled from a list with 234,936 entries overall. If you access this link instead, you'll get a plain text file from the same dictionary instead of an HTML page. In either case, this dictionary is loaded with extremely peculiar and archaic words, so don't be surprised if there are quite a few that you don't know!
Pick either dictionary. If you want, try both and see how they compare. If you are feeling curious, you can try several different random lists from one dictionary to see how stable your results are.
In order to match the estimated average word stock of U.S. high school graduates, you only need to "know" 51 of 100 from the smaller dictionary, or 17 of 100 from the larger one.
If you use the smaller dictionary, and you "know" 70 out of your sample of 100 entries, you can estimate that you know roughly 70/100 of the entire 78,984 entries, or 55,289. This is surely an underestimate of your "mental lexicon", since this wordlist doesn't include acronyms such as ASAP, DWI, fubar; company names like TWA, Exxon, Microsoft; institutional names like Harvard, Penn, Louvre; place names like Philadelphia, Albany, Katmandu; proper names like Clinton, Elvis, Socrates; and so on. Among these categories, you surely know several thousand additional items.
Note that some of the "entries" are words with internal spaces, such as time capsule or press box. You can treat these just like the solid entries -- it's no harder to figure out if you know what Ponzi scheme means than it is to see if you know the meaning of androcentric or microcode.
Of course, it isn't easy in any case -- without looking at the whole entry, you may sometimes be unsure whether your belief about a word's meaning is in fact correct. In such cases, you can look the word up in a regular paper dictionary, or via the on-line dictionaries available on the library's web site, or you can just score the word as a "maybe." In other cases, you may have partial knowledge -- for instance, you might know that exocrine is the opposite of endocrine, and has something to do with hormones and stuff, but be a little vague on exactly what it means beyond that. This is another case where you might score the word as "maybe." If you total your "yes" "maybe" and "no" items separately, you'll wind up with range of estimates, such as "I know between 65 and 78 of the items on my list."
2. Here is the second part of the assignment (from Farmer & Demers' A Linguistics Workbook):
In Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, he invents a slang vocabulary based mostly on borrowings from Russian. In 1962, when this novel was written, it was actually plausible that the direction of cultural influence might result in large-scale borrowings from Russian into English. To see why, read (at least the beginning of) a prescient 1994 article from Foreign Affairs by the economist Paul Krugman. The first three paragraphs of Krugman's article are quoted below:
ONCE UPON a time, Western opinion leaders found themselves both impressed and frightened by the extraordinary growth rates achieved by a set of Eastern economies. Although those economies were still substantially poorer and smaller than those of the West, the speed with which they had transformed themselves from peasant societies into industrial powerhouses, their continuing ability to achieve growth rates several times higher than the advanced nations, and their increasing ability to challenge or even surpass American and European technology in certain areas seemed to call into question the dominance not only of Western power but of Western ideology. The leaders of those nations did not share our faith in free markets or unlimited civil liberties. They asserted with increasing self confidence that their system was superior: societies that accepted strong, even authoritarian governments and were willing to limit individual liberties in the interest of the common good, take charge of their economics, and sacrifice short-run consumer interests for the sake of long-run growth would eventually outperform the increasingly chaotic societies of the West. And a growing minority of Western intellectuals agreed.
The gap between Western and Eastern economic performance eventually became a political issue. The Democrats recaptured the White House under the leadership of a young, energetic new president who pledged to "get the country moving again"--a pledge that, to him and his closest advisers, meant accelerating America's economic growth to meet the Eastern challenge.
The time, of course, was the early 1960s. The dynamic young president was John F. Kennedy. The technological feats that so alarmed the West were the launch of Sputnik and the early Soviet lead in space. And the rapidly growing Eastern economies were those of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.
Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962, when anxiety about Russian economic and technological prowess was at its height.
A short passage from the beginning of Burgess' book is quoted below:
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening [. . .] The Korova Milkbar was a milkplus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrowshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up [. . .] and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.
Match each of the words in boldface with one of the glosses given below. If the work is morphologically inflected, give the base form. Thus droogs seems like a plural noun, whose singular (base form) would be droog.
You should be able to do this fairly easily without cheating by looking the words up in an online glossary of nadsat.
In each case, indicate whether you were able to figure out the meaning just from reading the passage from the novel, without relying on the hint given by the list of glosses.
Do you know any Russian?