A preliminary investigation of the nature of frequency distributions of constituent elements of terms in terminology

A preliminary investigation of the nature of frequency distributions of the constituent elements of terms in terminology is carried out, and the result is reported. In order to approximate the regularity of frequency distributions, MizutanVs (1953) formula based on the projection function was applied to eight lists of terms in various domains. The result of using the established frequency-distribution models is promising in that (1) the approximation is fairly good and (2) the distribution patterns of the residuals are regular, which indicates the possibility of establishing a better model for frequency distributions. However, it is also observed that the parameters change systematically according to the sample size, which means that if we are to use the models of frequency distributions to characterise the terminology by means of a given sample, then the growth of the constituent elements in a terminology should be properly taken into consideration.