A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Lexis In Hong Kong And Native British Spoken English

Based on the corpus of Hong Kong English and that of native British English, the present study aims at characterizing the lexis in Hong Kong learners' spoken English. The Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) approach was adopted, which involves the comparisons between Hong Kong learners' English and native English. The study first investigates the quantitative features of the lexis in terms of vocabulary size, mean word length, lexical density and lexical coverage, and then moves to the qualitative interpretation of the features, particularly from perspectives of high frequency words, hapax legomena, inserts, informal words, contractions and abbreviations.Through a systematic study, the following conclusions are drawn. Firstly, compared with the significant differences between native spoken and written English, the differences between Hong Kong learners' spoken and written English are comparatively slight in terms of vocabulary size, mean word length, lexical density, and lexical coverage. Secondly, Hong Kong learners' spoken English, to a great extent, is characteristic of written style. Thirdly, there are more hapaxes in Hong Kong spoken English corpus than native spoken English corpus and among the hapaxes, there are more compounds in former corpus than in the latter. Fourthly, compared with native English speakers, Hong Kong learners tend to underuse inserts and informal words in their spoken English. Fifthly, there are great differences in the use of contractions and abbreviations between Hong Kong learners' spoken English and native spoken English. Sixthly, there exist phenomena of overgeneralization in Hong Kong learners' spoken English. Seventhly, among the words exclusively used in Hong Kong spoken English corpus, some are quite formal and the major processes for word formation are compounding and derivation.