Frequency Norms in Tashlhiyt: A Pilot Study

This article gives a preliminary account of lexical and sub-lexical frequency norms in Tashlhiyt, an Amazigh language of Morocco. A corpus of nine texts with roughly 19,000 words was analyzed as a list of structured representations for words that distinguish part of speech, open/closed class, morphological makeup, and surface versus lexical representations. A lexicon was built from the corpus to identify unique word types and to document the frequencies of these types. The frequencies of sub-lexical phonological segments are also documented and we investigate the impact of phonological representation, morpho-syntactic categories, and the type/token distinction on segment frequency. All of the frequency norms are available as open data sets.