A VOA Agriculture Report Corpus Based Macroscopic Study On The Lexical Features Of Agriculture English

The establishment and research of the agriculture English corpus belong to the research field of application of specialized corpus in the ESP teaching. ESP teaching has become the mainstream of English teaching in China in the21st century, therefore it is very important for the ESP researchers, teachers and learners to master ESP knowledge. Currently ESP teachers are mainly composed of college English teachers, whose lack of technical knowledge especially technical vocabulary causes the less effectiveness of ESP teaching. Specialized English corpus, the reasonable combination of both corpus linguistics and ESP, which provides a new perspective for ESP teaching and researching, is of great advantage in solving the problem of technical vocabulary in ESP teaching.Throughout the finished specialized corpora and the corpora that are under establishment in China, the agriculture English corpus is still a blank. So based on the self-built VOA agriculture report corpus, this study analyzes its lexical features to focus on the following research questions:how about the macroscopic lexical features of VOA agriculture report corpus? What are the characteristics of general agriculture words? What are the characteristics of technical agriculture words? How about the features of keywords during the ten years? And is there any typical feature of language use of the VOA agriculture report?The corpus-based approach is adopted as research method in this study. Firstly, TextEditor (3.0) is used to edit the515VOA agriculture report texts from2002to2011, thus a clean corpus forms; then, use AntConc (3.2.1) to get the word lists, and annotate the part of speech of each word in the word lists; keyword list can be obtained by comparison with the reference corpus COCA; and then the lexical features of VOA agriculture report can be revealed by comparison with the Brown corpus and analyzing the word lists as well as the keyword lists. Major findings are:the number of the words with high frequency is low while that with low frequency is high, so the word frequency is inversely proportional with the word quantity; content words especially nouns, verbs and adjectives with a total proportion of73.03%in the VOA agriculture report corpus are of a large proportion and high value; compared with the Brown Corpus, the average word length is a little bit higher, but the lexical density is obviously lower, so the lexical difficulty of VOA agriculture English is lower than that of the Brown Corpus; the general agriculture words scatter throughout the whole word list with simple form and high repetition rate; technical agriculture words are mostly with complex form and lower frequency, and they are multidisciplinary and rich in synonyms, proper nouns, and abbreviations etc; the number of keywords increases year by year, and they mainly focus on three domains:agricultural policies and news, popularization of agricultural techniques and agricultural scientific achievements; colloquialization is used a lot in the VOA agriculture report corpus.The establishment of the VOA agriculture report corpus is the first try at home, and it has a significant practical meaning for providing an example for the establishment of agriculture English corpus in the future. The corpus-based macroscopic research on the lexical features sheds some light for the agriculture ESP teaching and researching on lexical level.