A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Lexis in Hong Kong and Native British Spoken English

Based on the corpus of Hong Kong English and the one of native British English, the present study aims at characterizing the lexis in Hong Kong learners' spoken English. First, the study investigates the quantitative features of the lexis in terms of vocabulary size, mean word length, lexical density, and lexical coverage, and then moves on to the qualitative interpretation of the features, particularly from the perspectives of high frequency words, hapax legomena, inserts, informal words, contractions, and abbreviations.