Computational Stylistic Characteristics Of American English

It is one of the most fashionable trends to learn American English in China, and American English is always the hot area for scholars to do research in. However, most of the studies are orientated to qualitative rather than quantitative, which indicates the lack of quantitative research in this field. This study adopted the corpus-based approach to study the stylistic characteristics of American English. The Open American National Corpus (OANC) with the corpus size of 18 million was made comparison with a set of samples named BNCS with similar corpus size. The BNCS was drawn randomly from the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC). The comparison was made aiming to reveal the stylistic characteristics of American English on the aspects of word length, TTR, high frequency vocabulary and sentence length.This study was carried out by the guidance of modern stylistics. With the aid of computer program, the tasks of data collection and calculation were carried out while all the data on the four aspects were carefully studied and analyzed with the help of statistical software SPSS. The results show that the word length of American English is longer than that of British English, and the TTR is larger. On the aspect of high frequency words, although the percentage of function words in the top 100 words is similar in the two corpora, it turns out that the sum frequency of the top 100 words in American English is smaller than that in British English. In addition, American English has shorter sentence length than British English.