thanfrequency

Thanfrequency is a quantitative concept used in corpus linguistics to describe the frequency and distribution of the word than within a text or collection of texts, with particular emphasis on comparative constructions. It is typically reported as occurrences per million words or as a relative frequency within a subcorpus, enabling comparisons across genres, time periods, or languages.

Calculation of thanfrequency involves tokenizing the corpus and identifying instances of than. This often requires part-of-speech tagging or syntactic parsing to distinguish uses in comparative clauses (for example, bigger than) from idiomatic or fixed phrases (such as nothing more than). Some approaches further separate overt comparisons from abstract or rhetorical uses of than, and may account for polysemy, negation, or ellipsis that affect interpretation.

Applications of thanfrequency include tracking shifts in the use of explicit comparison in written and spoken language, comparing writing styles between domains (academic, journalistic, creative), and supporting historical linguistics studies that examine how comparative syntax evolves. It can also be used in cross-linguistic research to explore how languages encode comparison, or in readability and complexity analyses where frequent explicit comparisons correlate with certain text characteristics.

Limitations should be noted: accurate measurement depends on reliable disambiguation of than, which can be challenging in noisy corpora or in languages with different comparative constructions. Normalization choices, corpus composition, and parsing accuracy all influence the resulting thanfrequency value. See also frequency analysis, corpus linguistics, and comparative constructions.