A Quantitative Stylistic Analysis Of E-mail On Mailing Lists

This thesis is a corpus-based study of stylistic features of e-mail on mailing lists compared with typical written and spoken registers represented by LOB (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus in British English concerning academic writing: .T text) and BNC (British National Corpus concerning spontaneous conversation: KC4, KC5, KC9, KCA, and KCB).V/ith the assistance of computer software and programs, especially SNOBOL4, Visual FoxPro, C program and SPSS, textual, interpersonal and ideational features of e-mail in E-MAIL corpus comparing with two other corpora are investigated. And through Chi-square tests, Z-tests and other statistical techniques, the frequency and distribution of selected features in the three aspects are analyzed statistically.After a systematic research, the following conclusions are drawn: first, e-mail, as a relatively new style, is a hybrid of the two registers according to the analyses of the selected features; secondly, e-mail is similar to spoken language in lexical aspect and to written language in grammatical aspect; whereas e-mail has its own unique features in interpersonal and ideational aspects; and finally, this thesis provides insight into the way these distinctive features in e-mail being used to achieve the communicative efficiency.At the end, suggestions for instructional guidance will be given and further research will be indicated as well.