Akkudichte

Akkudichte is a quantitative metric used in corpus linguistics to measure the density of accusative case usage in a text. The term combines the German word for the accusative case, Akkusativ, with Dichte, meaning density or concentration. It is applied to assess how frequently nouns or noun phrases appear in the accusative case within a given sample.

Calculation and interpretation are central to Akkudichte. For a text sample, researchers annotate noun phrases with their syntactic case and count the number of accusative noun phrases (N_acc) as well as the total number of noun phrases (N_total). A common definition is Akkudichte = (N_acc / N_total) × 100, yielding a percentage that reflects how often the accusative is used relative to all noun phrases. Some studies use alternative denominators, such as per 1,000 words or per sentence, to control for text length. Interpretations of the resulting values focus on pattern differences across genres, registers, or languages, with higher values signaling more frequent accusative marking.

Applications of Akkudichte include cross-linguistic comparison of case systems, diachronic studies of language change, and genre-level analyses of syntactic style. It can supplement other measures of syntactic complexity and serve as a normalization tool when comparing corpora of differing sizes or annotation schemes. Practitioners emphasize consistent annotation standards and careful consideration of the linguistic properties of each language, since case-marking conventions vary widely and some languages rely on postpositional markers or syntactic alternatives to explicit case marking.

Limitations of the metric stem from annotations, denominators, and corpus composition. Despite these caveats, Akkudichte can illuminate patterns of case usage in large-scale language data.