A Quantitative Study Of The Grammatical Features Of The Sixty Christmas Speeches Broadcast By Queen Elizabeth â…¡

Birtish English is recognized by many English learners as the Standard English，andQueen’s English is considered as a model for many female English learners to imitate.Queen Elizabeth II broadcasts her Christmas speeches every year, which has already lastedfor more than60years. It has already become a tradition for British people to listen to herspeech on Chirstmas days. So the research on Queen Elizabeth II，s Christmas speeches notonly can improve English learners’ speech writing ability, but also can help them to have abetter understanding of Christmas speeches and western culture.Taking English grammar, to be exact, the grammar theoires put forward by Quirk et aiand Biber et al as the theoretical foundation and quantitative method as the researchmethod, this research explores the grammatical features of sixty Christmas speechesaddressed b’y Britains queen Elizabeth II and aims to answer the following questions:1)How do the grammatical elements, such as sentences, clauses, noun phrases, etc. distributewithin Christmas speeches?2) Do these grammatical features reflected by the distributionof the grammatical elements change with the advance of time? If they do, what are thechanging rules?3) What are the causal factors of these grammatical features and changingrules?Through careful analysis, it is discovered that almost all kinds of sentences, clauses,and noun phrases are adopted in Chirstmas speeches. However, declarative sentences,complex sentences, relative clauses, and the pro-posted adverbial clauses take upcomparatively larger proportions both in number and in percentage. At the same time,through the comparative study, it is found that some changes have taken place both in thenumber and in the proportion of some grammatical elements duirng the sixty years, and towhich some certain changing rules are presented. For example, generally speaking, theproportion of adverbial clauses shows a falling trend, but that of appositive clauses a irsingone during the six decades. As for the reasons，they may mainly lie in two aspects: thefunctions of vairous sentences, clauses and noun phrases, and the addresse’rs socialbackground. Though this study still have some limitations, such as the deviation in statistics causedby manual work, it lays a foundation for English learners to have a better understanding ofChirstmas speeches, and provides other researchers with some valuable reference for theirfurther studies.