A Comparison Of Beijing Olympic English Vocabulary In Chinese And American News Media

Sport is a sign of social civilization and also an indispensable part in people's daily lives.It has drawn more and more attention nowadays.The Olympic Games which is held every four years is the grandest sports event in the world and the gathering of the excellent athletes from different countries.The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is the most meaningful event which took place in China last year.Through successfully hosting the 29^th Olympic Games,China has broadened her influence all over the world. Many media from various countries have given detailed reports on the Games.In this thesis,the English news reports produced by Chinese and American media are collected as the study material for the lexical comparison.The purposes of this thesis are to reveal the lexical features of the Beijing Olympic news reports by Chinese and American news media respectively and further make a comparative study between them so as to see if there are any similarities or differences between the reports written by non-native speakers and native speakers concerning one common issue in terms of the use of lexis.In order to achieve these aims,two corpora (CMR and AMR),both of which are over 120,000 words,are built.Based on the theories of lexical analysis and with the aid of computer softwares,the study has been undertaken from three aspects - detailed statistic information,words of top frequency and key words of the two corpora.The key words analysis is the highlight of this thesis. Key words can be divided into positive key words and negative ones,and positive key words can reflect the theme of a particular text or a corpus.By studying key words,the lexical features of the reports are revealed thoroughly.The findings indicate that similarities and differences do exist between the reports by Chinese and American media.This study intends to be helpful to the non-native speakers in their reading and writing English sports news and further understanding the specific lexical features of sports new English as a sub-variety of news English.