A Corpus-based Study On The Lexical Characteristics Of Commercial English

Driven by the economic globalization, the economic bonds among countries are increasingly tightened. English, as a global language, serves as the official language in various commercial activities. In this case, people pay more attention to commercial English than before.The only data source of this study is BNC, from which 7 sets of text samples, each set containing 1,000,000 words, are randomly drawn from the commerce domain of the BNC written section. One of the sets is chosen as the representative of commercial English, and another 1,000,000 words were randomly drawn from the entire BNC written section as the representative of general English. They are named as CCBNC and RCBNC respectively. This research intends to analyze the lexical characteristics of commercial English in terms of vocabulary size, lexical density, vocabulary growth, word length, and word frequency distribution.The results of the research show that:1. Compared with RCBNC, CCBNC has a smaller vocabulary size and lower lexical density.2. In analyzing the vocabulary growth curve of CCBNC, we find out that the vocabulary growth rate of CCBNC is lower than that of RCBNC; furthermore, it is found out that the Brunet's Model conforms well to the vocabulary growth curve of CCBNC.3. The mean word length of CCBNC is longer than that of RCBNC; the word length distribution of CCBNC and RCBNC shows that the longer a word is, the lower its frequency is, and vice versa.4. From the perspective of word frequency distribution, it can be found out that there is a great overlap between the high frequency vocabulary in CCBNC and that in RCBNC, with the function words taking up a large proportion in the high frequency vocabulary in both CCBNC and RCBNC; the low frequency vocabulary distribution (in this thesis means frequency no more than three) in CCBNC and that in RCBNC are basically the same, and the distribution of hapax legomena, dis legomena and tris legomena, separately, is also the same; The vocabulary shared by CCBNC and RCBNC takes up 70%, while the CCBNC-only vocabulary only take up 30% of the entire vocabulary of CCBNC; proper nouns of human names, organization names and product names, of which the initialisms and acronyms take up a high proportion, occupy a considerable percentage in CCBNC-only vocabulary.