A Comparative Lexical Study Of Speeches Between WTO Director General And World Bank President Robert Zoellick

WTO and the World Bank are considered to be the most influential and significant international organizations dealing with economic development for global citizens. The speeches delivered by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy and the President of the World Bank Robert Zoellick serve as the transmitter of information and message from inside the organization to the world and vice versa. All the previous studies centered on the legal documents and conventions from the perspective of law. While this research focused on lexical comparative analysis with their available speech text files as target corpora.This study is a corpus-based analysis aiming to find out the similarities and differences between these two spokesmen in word choice and word characteristics.Lexical software like Antconc, FoxPro and SPSS were adopted to analyze the following word features:vocabulary size, word frequency, word length, keywords, shared words and unique words.It turned out that there exist both similarities and differences between these speech corpora. To be more concrete, the similarity between both corpora is that since they are both speeches of international economic organizations, so they involve economic words as high frequency words, for example, economic, China, etc. The growing significance of China in international business can be apparently observed. In addition to that, choice of words among the list of high frequency top100and keywords list top100are all common words which fit the features of public speeches. As for the differences, since WTO more concentrate on multilateral economic corporations, the high frequency words are WTO, Lamy, etc. While the World Bank takes eliminating world wide poverty by providing developing countries financial aids as its ultimate goal, keywords and high frequency words are developing, Africa, aid, etc. In the end, research significance was illustrated. On one hand, this comparative analysis will be greatly helpful for outsiders to know WTO and the World Bank much better. On the other hand, it will enable linguistics and language learners to conduct English speech course much more smoothly and productively, and provide pedagogic reference. The result could be helpful for per-course textbook design as well for editors and publishers.