Core Vocabulary In Contemporary English

In the domain of lexis, core items are generally seen to be the most basic and simple. Yet, they are often high in information content and are of critical importance in language acquisition. This thesis aims to undertake a systematic and profound exploration on core vocabulary, including description of former related researches, corpus-based study of the practical use of core vocabulary in naturally occurring texts and its possible application in aspects such as language teaching and lexicography. With the aid of relevant linguistic theories and scientific research methods such as SNOBOL4 and SPSS software package, quantitative and qualitative analyses on core vocabulary are undertaken in a small scale.Results show that core vocabulary has multiple senses and a wide collocational range. Its senses are heavily context-dependent and difficult to pin down. This illustrates that core vocabulary is more tightly integrated than others into the language system. Meanwhile, core vocabulary usually has a high frequency and evenly distributes over a wide range of spoken and written English. This further proves that core vocabulary is more pragmatically neutral in that they convey no information about the situation of utterance and give no indication of the field, tenor, and mode of the discourse from which a text is taken. Hopefully this thesis can arouse attention to core vocabulary which are easily neglected by EFL learners, contribute to their thorough understanding of this area and inspire further related research.