A Dynamic Study of English Intertextual Lexical Repetition Rates

作者:Zhao, Xiaodong*; Feng, Zhiwei
来源:Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 2014, 21(1): 65-84.
DOI:10.1080/09296174.2013.856129

摘要

This research divides the large-scale written British National Corpus (BNC) and American National Corpus (ANC) into the experimental set and test set and makes a dynamic study of the English intertextual lexical repetition rates. First, a theoretical mathematical model to calculate intertextual lexical repetition rates is established. Then based on the experimental set, the standard deviations for the repetition rates of all text pairs and the 95% confidence intervals for the estimated values of repetition rates for all text pairs are calculated. After the test of the model and its 95% confidence intervals against all the observed intertextual lexical repetition rates in the test set, it is found that the theoretical model and its 95% confidence intervals experience a very small margin of error, and the model can be used to estimate the intertextual lexical repetition rates and their possible range of variation for authentic English texts of different lengths. The significance of this research is that it can be applied in English teaching, learning and English textbook compilation.

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