Construction and Interpretation Of Corpus-Based English Poetry Vocabulary Profile

Vocabulary Profilers (VPrs) are deeply rooted in pedagogical purposes. The current investigation, however, uses the Classic and Compleat VPrs to: 1) determine the distribution and content of vocabulary in an English poetry corpus 2) explain differences in the constituents of the vocabulary profile (VP), 3) explore the role of language users in constructing the VP. The corpus includes Extended Corpus (EC: 1.363.225 words), Micro Corpus (MC: 43.200 words) from thirty-six poets, and two poems translated into Arabic. The main results show that Types, Offlist words, Academic and Anglo-Saxon words outline the VP, and that the number of Types and the size of the Individual Mental Lexicon constitute the main features of the translator’s VP. The paper concludes that the poet’s construction of the poetry VP undergoes multilayer interpretation by the reader/analyst and the translator, who utilize their socio-environmental context to pin down the semantic potential of the VP anew.