Purpose

this paper we want to make a small contribution to the study of spoken language by discussing a number of measures of written transcriptions of spoken language which can be obtained very readily by making a few small additions to generally available word processing mechanisms to be described below. We are aware that analyzing transcriptions still involves reliance on a written language version of spoken language. This admittedly is a weakness but we hope that the properties of language we will be discussing will retain their value even after spoken language becomes more accessible for direct measure than today. The measures we suggest can be viewed as alternatives and additions to other quantitative measures such as those discussed, for example, in Biber (1988) or Johansson & Stenström (1991) but have the virtue, we believe, of being slightly more easily available