Characteristics Of Word Class Distribution In European Union Treaty English

This thesis is a corpus-based study. It aims at investigating the distribution of word classes in European Union Treaty English. The author first built a European Union Treaty Corpus (EUTC), which includes some important European Union treaties. In addition, the author sampled 400 texts from the BNC to form a reference corpus, BNCR, and then used FoxPro programs to calculate the frequencies and obtained the word class distribution of EUTC and the reference corpus, BNCR.Based on Quirk's classification of word classes, the author carries out detailed analysis of the major word classes of EUTC and BNCR. As shown in the study, nouns account for the largest percentage of EU Treaty English, while prepositions and determiners come to the second and the third. Nouns, prepositions and determiners are used more frequently in EU Treaty English than in General English; on the other hand, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and conjunctions are used less frequently. The author finds there is significant difference in the distributions of word classes between EUTC and BNCR.