Researches On Allusions To The Bible

The English Bible's influence upon both the written and spoken English is unmatchable. With the frequent use of the Bible, enormous allusions came into being and have become a part of the English language. Through my research work, I have collected more than 800 allusions. The purpose of the thesis is to throw light on the source, understanding, meaning and structure of these allusions and find their distributive features in different corpora. Investigations were made into the single lexical items and multi-word lexical items to reveal their lexical features from the respective of word-formation. In this thesis I extensively used the following corpora: LOBA, BROWNA and T4. I have also built a corpus NOVEL consisting of novels. By applying statistics software package SPSS, I obtained the frequencies of the allusions in different corpora. Chi-square test is used to check the robustness of the result. I have drawn the conclusion that allusions to the Bible have their peculiar structural features and the frequency of allusions to the Bible is lower than we expected. The result is of great value to the preparation of GET Band 4 and Band 6 tests.