Analisi di Lessico e Spelling nell'Inglese Canadese

This dissertation is divided into three chapters: the first chapter briefly outlines the history of Canadian English and the related theories on its origin, beginning with the early books and diaries written by English travellers and emigrants to Canada and moving forward with the first comparative lists of words juxtaposing lexical items of Canadian English and those of British and American English. An additional comment is then made on the nature of Canadian lexis, its subdivisions and categorisations with particular emphasis on the suggestions made by C.J. Lovell; the concluding segment is dedicated to further studies on the parallel proliferation of British and American words in Canadian lexis, as well as on how it was influenced by indigenous Native American languages and Eskimo. The second chapter introduces the subject-matter and describes the data used for this case study, namely the compilation of two newspaper corpora of Canadian English ¿ about 50,000 words each ¿ drawn from two of the best-selling Canadian national newspapers, i.e. The Globe and Mail and National Post. The third and final chapter comprises a corpus-based analysis of the newspaper corpora described in the previous chapter. The analysis, carried out by means of WordSmith Tools, is aimed at extracting wordlists from each newspaper corpus and comparing them with the wordlists obtained from two reference corpora, that is the Freiburg Brown Corpus of American English (FROWN) and the Freiburg update of the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English (FLOB), in order to highlight the lexical items typical of Canadian English.