Using Keyword Tools to Explore Lexical Differences between British and American English in Specialised Corpora

Abstract

The article suggests that keyword tools have been ignored in computer-assisted language learning and computer-assisted translating, and shows how it can, for example, shed light on lexical differences between British and US tourism texts, and thus help students to make appropriate lexical choices depending on the audience they are writing for. A brief introduction to the main tools of corpus analysis programs (i.e. the concordancer, the word-list tool and the keyword tool) is followed by a survey of various reference corpora that have been utilised to generate keyword lists for corpora under investigation. For this study, two equal-size corpora – one comprising texts from British tourist brochures and the other from US tourist brochures – are used to generate keyword lists, and explanations are proposed for some of the lexical differences. Key-cluster lists as well as searches with the concordancer are also employed to supplement and aid the analysis. Though tourism texts form the basis of this study, the same approach could also be adopted to find lexical differences between different varieties of English in other specialised domains.