DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L319.446
Authors: Ms. Sufang Duan
Abstract: As one important aspect of stylistic research, formality reflects and influences the quality of the discourse, and it has a very close relationship with lexical density. Jean Ure (1971) has pointed out that lexical density can be calculated as a standard for distinguishing the degree of formality. The more formal the genre is, the higher lexical density is. Based on this theory, the present study investigates the lexical density in academic journals written respectively by German and English writers. 20 articles about linguistics from each language are chosen as data. The statistic results show that compared with English articles, lexical density is a little bit higher in German. This reveals that German writers are inclined to use more complex content words in academic journals, which can be the result of the grammatical structure of German. This finding will be helpful for further research about comparative study and academic writing.
Keywords: formality; lexical density; comparative study
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