A Corpus-based Study On The Lexical Change Of The English Language

This corpus-based research studies lexical change of the standard written British English from late 1950s and early 1960s to the mid 1980s and mid 1990s. A set of sample - BNCS was drawn randomly from the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) for comparison with the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus. The results show that the TTR and word length of standard written British English have changed significantly within the 30 years: the TTR of the standard written British English in the late 1950s and early 1960s is smaller than that of the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, which indicates that the standard written British English in the mid 1980s and mid 1990s has a higher information load than that in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the word length of the standard written British English in the late 1950s and early 1960s is shorter than that of the mid 1980s and mid 1990s. Furthermore, by comparing BNCS with LOB, we have LOB-only vocabulary (words unique to LOB), shared vocabulary between BNCS and LOB, and BNCS-only vocabulary (words unique to BNCS). The study shows that, the vocabulary of the standard written British English has undergone remarkable changes within the three decades: the predominance of vocabulary in art and music area in the late 1950s and early 1960s has given way to the predominance of vocabulary on science and technology in the mid 1980s and mid 1990s. The main reason is that 1960s was the greatest decade in pop music history while the 1990s saw the rapid development of science and technology, especially computer technology. Further investigation of word formation processes shows that the vocabulary in mid 1980s and mid 1990s tends to adopt compounding and initialism more often than that in the late 1950s and early 1960s.