Comparison Of Syllabic Word Length And Frequency Distribution Between Mee And CET4

The study of word length has a history of more than160years up to now, whose result can be used as an indicator of individual style. This thesis takes syllable as unit of measurement. Based on one million words MEE corpus and one hundred and ten thousand words CET4corpus, this thesis makes large amount of statistical calculations and comparisons of syllabic word length and frequency distribution between MEE and CET4, MEE-only words and CET4-only words and those of shared words. Besides, syllabic word length features of low frequency and high frequency words, personal names, place names and hapax legomena are analyzed. Power-law function model y=A x-b verifies the relation between syllabic word length and syllable length in letters.Through statistical analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn:firstly, the word length of MEE is longer than that of CET4; secondly, there is no significant difference in the frequency distribution between MEE and CET4; thirdly, MEE corpus tends to use more hyphen connected compounds; fourthly, personal names and place names are relative short but still much harder to remember since they have their peculiar origins and are not familiar to students; fifthly, the mean syllabic word lengths of hapax legomena in MEE, CET4, MEE-only words, CET4-only words and shared wordlist are all longer than the corresponding mean ones with the order as follows:MEE-only words> MEE> CET4-only words> CET4> shared words (by CET4)> shared words (by MEE); sixthly, the modal y=A x-b adequately describes the relationship between syllabic word length and syllable length in letters.