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Do you know about this site: http://corpus.byu.edu/ for corpora search? I think I would take your intuitive word list to a good thesaurus and see what it comes up with in addition, and then search the corpus for all of the results of that extended list, then choosing the 20 or so most frequent of those for your analysis. I think you can be pretty confident that you won't overlook a very common word if you go about it that way, and it should be methodically valid.
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