A Corpus-based Study On The Lexical Features Of The Economist

Founded in London in 1843, the Economist ranges over a variety of topics and its high quality use of the English language situates it within the English news media hence it is one of English learners’ favorite reading materials. Since its target readers are those who have fair educational background, the words of the Economist are more difficult than those of other English news. Previously, the Economist was always taken as one aspect of news English corpora in studies. This thesis solely studies the Economist from the perspectives of vocabulary size, word length, lexical density, word frequency, keywords, and lexical coverage. Through this research, some suggestions can be given to Chinese English learners and readers.This paper adopts the corpus-based approach, and combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis. Three corpora, including EC, BNC, and ENC are employed to make this comparative analysis. Through this research, the following findings can be obtained:firstly, EC and BNC have the similar vocabulary size; Secondly, through comparative analysis with BNC and ENC, EC has the longest mean word length and highest lexical density. In the meantime, EC has a higher percentage of lexical words than BNC in the top 100 high frequency words and these lexical words concern politics, business, economics, and finance; there are 11813 hapax legomena, in which common noun ranks first, proper noun ranks second, and 588 acronyms exist; politics-related words count most among top 100 positive keywords; the lexical coverage of ENC word list over EC is up to 82%, so there is a close relationship between ENC an EC.