A Corpus-based Analysis Of Lexical Features Of News English

In modern days, as the pace of social development grows ever faster, the thingson the earth become unpredictable. However, people can always find out the latestchanges happening in the society by means of various kinds of news channels.Therefore, both news and news language become the study objects of a lot of scholars.The object of this thesis is lexicon which is the most basic and active in newslanguage, the author does a quantitative and qualitative analysis with the expectationof summarizing the lexical features of news English.Language research is a discipline of achieving great success in liberal arts field.The rise of modern linguistics and the combination of linguistics with natural scienceespecially, force people to make a more profound understanding of the essence oflanguage. In this thesis, a new approach combining linguistics with natural science,corpus-based approach is introduced. The deep discussion and comprehensiveanalysis of news English lexicon and interrelated studies are illustrated through thisapproach. The author puts forward several views and recommendations in terms oflanguage teaching and learning according to the data analysis.In this study, BNC is used as the reference corpus, while the research corpus isReuters corpus supported by NIST. The author processes Reuters corpus according toits characteristics, and analyzes news English lexicon in respects of vocabulary size,word length, lexical density and the distribution of word frequency. At the beginningof the thesis, literature review at home and abroad on news English, lexicon andcorpus linguistics and important terms are presented. Then the research corpus isprocessed and analyzed by computer algorithms and software tools. At last, bycomparison and analysis the writer of the thesis finds out the lexical features of newsEnglish, namely, extensive use of short words and abbreviations, new wordsappearing thick and fast, high frequency of “say” words and so on. To some extent,this corpus-based lexicon study is instructive to news English learning, writing and teaching.