Early estimates .
Sir Francis Galton was one of the first scientists to apply the lexical hypothesis to the study of personality, while a 1926 study of
Webster's New International Dictionary by M. L. Perkins provided an estimate of 3,000 such terms. These early explorations and estimates were not limited to the English-speaking world, with philosopher and psychologist
Ludwig Klages stating in 1929 that the German language contains approximately 4,000 words to describe inner states.
Psycholexical studies Allport & Odbert . Nearly half a century after Galton first investigated the lexical hypothesis,
Franziska Baumgarten published the first psycholexical classification of personality-descriptive terms. Using dictionaries and
characterology publications, Baumgarten identified 1,093 separate terms in the German language used for the description of personality and mental states. Although this number is similar in size to the German and English estimates offered by earlier researchers,
Gordon Allport and Henry S. Odbert revealed this to be a severe underestimate in a 1936 study. Similar to the earlier work of M. L. Perkins, they used
Webster's New International Dictionary as their source. From this list of approximately 400,000 words, Allport and Odbert identified 17,953 unique terms used to describe personality or behavior. Allport and Odbert included this group to appease researchers of
social psychology,
sociology, and ethics. used
factor analysis to explore the more general structure of the trait terms in Allport and Odbert's Column I. Rather than rely on the factors obtained by these researchers, Despite finding a five-factor structure similar to Fiske's, Norman decided to use Allport and Odbert's original list to create a more precise and better-structured taxonomy of terms. Using the 1961 edition of Webster's International Dictionary, Norman added relevant terms and removed those from Allport and Odbert's list that were no longer in use. This resulted in a source list of approximately 40,000 potential trait-descriptive terms. Using this list, Norman then removed terms that were deemed archaic or obsolete, solely evaluative, overly obscure, dialect-specific, loosely related to personality, and purely physical. By doing so, Norman reduced his original list to 2,797 unique trait-descriptive terms.
Juri Apresjan and the Moscow Semantic School During the 1970s,
Juri Apresjan, a founder of the Moscow Semantic School, developed the systemic, or systematic, method of
lexicography which utilizes the concept of
the language picture of the world. This concept is also termed
the naive picture of the world in order to stress the non-scientific description of the world which is found in natural language. In his book "Systematic Lexicography", which was published in English in 2000, J.D.Apresjan puts forward the idea of building dictionaries on the basis of "reconstructing the so-called naive picture of the world, or the "world-view", underlying the partly universal and partly language specific pattern of conceptualizations inherent in any natural language". In his opinion, the general world-view can be fragmented into different more local pictures of reality, such as naive geometry, naive physics, naive psychology, and so forth. In particular, one chapter of the book Apresjan allots to the description of lexicographic reconstruction of
the language picture of the human being in the Russian language. Later, Apresjan's work was the basis for Sergey Golubkov's further attempts to build "the language personality theory" which would be different from other lexically-based personality theories (e.g. by Allport, Cattell, Eysenck, etc.) due to its
meronomic (partonomic) nature versus the
taxonomic nature of the previously mentioned personality theories.
Psycholexical studies of values In addition to research on personality, the psycholexical method has also been applied to the study of
values in multiple languages, providing a contrast with theory-driven approaches such as Schwartz's
Theory of Basic Human Values. ==Similar concepts==