Study On Vocabulary Deriving From Greco-Roman Mythology

This thesis is to study the words deriving from Greco-Roman mythology in the English language. The study is focused on the way and reason for the words from Greco-Roman mythology into the English language, their types and the characteristics of their pronunciations, their forms and their meanings, reveals their background cultures and analyzes the significance of the background cultures to the extended meanings of the words. The study has proved that these words basically enter into English from Greek via Latin or French, or from Latin directly. A majority of words from Greco-Roman mythology are able to derive new words.The study is based on the statistical analysis of the frequencies and distributions of the words from Greco-Roman mythology in LMENC, as compared with the other three corpora, BROWNA, LOBA and T4. The Visual Basic and Foxpro programs are applied to process the data provided in the corpora. And Chi-square test has been utilized to analyze the results obtained from the corpora.The research has proved that the words deriving from Greco-Roman mythology occur with the lowest frequency in LMENC, while with the highest frequency in BROWNA.