A Corpus-based Study On Americanization Of British English Vocabulary

Due to historical reasons, English entered American continent and evolved into American English. British English and American English are roughly the same, but they are still different in voice, vocabulary and grammar. Experts and scholars around the world have done a lot of researches and illustrated the differences between British English and American English in order to avoid misunderstanding.After the Second World War, America has boomed in economy, culture and politics, which laid the foundation for the American English sweeping across the whole world. British English is also affected by the USA culture, showing a trend of Americanization. This article attempts to use comparative analysis and historical analysis to study British diachronic corpora and American diachronic corpora, and make a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data from the perspective of vocabulary to find the degree and the trend of the English language development. And English noun evolution will be discussed in this thesis. Through specific vocabulary and data analysis of historical evolution and development trend of the human language, it will be more conducive to the language acquisition.According to the study of the four corpora, lexical density and average word length increase in both British diachronic corpora and American diachronic corpora. By the comparison of the1960s’ synchronic corpora of Brown and Lob and1990s’ synchronic corpora of Frown and Flob, we find that American English has penetrating influence on British English, which is a significant effect. In comparison with the USA corpora Brown and Frown, we obtain the unique words in Frown. Then its occurrences in the1991British corpus Flob prove that British English is evolving on the trace of American English and producing many new words about science and technology and daily life.