A Study On Lexical Features Of American Teenage Spoken English

Teenagers belong to a very dynamic social group and their speeches have many of their own characteristics. This research aims at providing a systematic study on the lexical features of American teenage spoken English based on the theories of stylistics, lexicon and sociolinguistics.Two corpora have been built to meet the research purpose:one with twenty-two well-received American teenage movies' subtitles (ATMS) produced during the year of 1999 to 2010, in comparison with the other, the corpus with natural conversations of Contemporary American spoken English (CASE). With the aid of FoxPro programs, WordSmith and Excel, a comparative study of the two corpora is undertaken from the perspective of the lexical richness, lexical frequency and word length distributions with a quantitative approach. Then, the qualitative analyses focus on the unique features of American teenage vocabulary including the use of teenage slang, emotional and swear words, and the related explanations for these distinct features are also displayed. The following major findings are obtained:First, teenage spoken English shares many similar lexical features with people of other ages from the aspects of lexical richness, lexical frequency and word length distribution. There are also some slight differences:The TTR and STTR of the corpus of CASE (3.01,30.17) is slightly higher than ATMS (2.96,30.09); There are relatively more informal and simpler words in the 100 most frequently used words of ATMS than in CASE; The corpus of ATMS has a relatively larger number of 2 to 5-letter words (77.36%) than CASE (70.05%), and the former has a smaller number of 6 and more-letter words (16.79%) than the latter (23.37%). Second, large numbers of slang words, emotional words and swear words are adopted by teenagers in their spoken language, and there are many unique features of their usages and implications.In the last section, the implications and limitations of the present study are discussed. Suggestions for further investigation on related subjects are given.