A Word Type-based Quantitative Study on the Lexical Change of American and British English*

The purpose of the study is to partially replicate and extend Fan’s (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) study and investigate the lexical change of American and British English between the 1960s and the 2010s. The study is different from Fan (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in that we used word types instead of lemmas and we used different reference corpora to solve the issue of incomparability between the corpora. Results of the top 100 high frequency words were comparable to Fan (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Meanwhile, results of vocabulary growth in terms of both word types and lemmas showed that there is no change in vocabulary growth of both American and British English, which is different from those of Fan (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We argue that the difference may result from the incomparability of the texts domains in the corpora used in Fan (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Meanwhile, though significant difference of vocabulary richness was found in American and British English between the 1960s and the 2010s, which is similar to Fan (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the effect size of the difference was very minuscule and the differences may result from the large size of the corpora. Last, also different from Fan (2012 Fan, F. (2012). A quantitative study on the lexical change of American English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 19(3), 171–180.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the word length of American English was found to have significantly decreased from the 1960s to the 2010s in terms of word types, while that of the British English remained stable. The effect size of the word length chi-square tests on both American and British English is also very minuscule.