| 2010 Shanghai World Expo is a global gala. During the expo, many reports about it have been made by Chinese and American journalists. Due to many reasons such as cultural and ideological differences, there are many similarities and differences of news reports on Shanghai World Expo between Chinese and American media. A comparative lexical study is made in this paper of the English reports on Shanghai World Expo between Chinese and American media.This paper, a corpus-based study, aims at making an investigation of the lexical features of Shanghai World Expo news reports between Chinese and American media to see whether there are any similarities or differences between the reports written by non-native speakers and native speakers in terms of the use of lexis. The author of this paper set up two corpora with more than 100,000 words respectively with the content of reports on Shanghai World Expo of Chinese media (CMC) and American media (AMC). Through the assistance of some softwares and procedures, such as Antconc, Perl and SPSS, a quantitative and qualitative analysis is made by the author from the aspects of basic statistic data, top frequencies, key words, shared words and unique words.Through comparison, it has been perceived that some similarities and differences do exist in CMC and AMC. As to vocabulary size and lexical density, CMC is lower than AMC; while as to word length, CMC is longer than AMC. Second, as to top frequency words, most words in CMC and AMC are overlapping and most words in the top 50 words of the two corpora are closed-class words. Third, most positive key words in CMC and AMC are nouns and proper nouns have taken a large proportion; the positive key verbs in CMC are more than those in AMC but the positive key adjectives are just the opposite. Fourth, the shared words of both CMC and AMC are more than 50% of the two corpora and most unique words are proper nouns with low frequencies. At last, this analysis gives English learners a clear idea of the lexical features of special genre and improves their ability of reading and writing. |
