There Is Little Difference Between American And British Movies

By Author: Solo Chen
Total Articles: 129
Comment this article

The last row of Table 1 shows that the movies consisted of 2,841,887 running words. The average movie was 8,937 running words with a running time of 113.5 minutes. The first 1,000 word families accounted for most of the tokens with the number consistently decreasing as the word frequency decreases. The most frequent 1,000 word families accounted for 86.52% of the words, the second 1,000 word families accounted for 4.15% of the words, and the third 1,000 word families accounted for 1.72% of the words. This demonstrates the relative significance of knowing the most frequent word families. By the fifth 1,000 word families, the percentage of words which occurred in the movies was less than 1 %. The percentage of proper nouns found in the movies was 2.67%, which was the third highest percentage of tokens after the first and second 1,000 word families. Clearly, this demonstrates the importance of being able to recognize proper nouns. Nation (2006) took the approach that Pandora Jewelry proper nouns and marginal words have a minimal learning burden in his analysis of ...
... the discourse in the movie Shrek. If we assume that learners know the proper nouns and marginal words then we can add those figures to the coverage needed to know each 1,000 word level. Table 2 shows the cumulative coverage for the tokens in the movies with and without the proper nouns and marginal words.

Table 2 shows that if learners did not know the proper nouns and marginal words, they would need a vocabulary of the most frequent 7,000 word families to reach 95.03% coverage and a vocabulary of 14,000 word families would provide only 95.79% coverage. In contrast, if learners knew the proper nouns and Tiffany Jewelry marginal words, they would reach 95.76% coverage with a vocabulary of the most frequent 3,000 word families. A vocabulary of 6,000 word families plus the proper nouns and marginal words would provide 98.15% coverage. Table 3 shows the cumulative coverage for the tokens in the American and British movies. The American movies consisted of 2,655,201 running words and the British movies consisted of 186,686 running words. Including proper nouns and marginal words, the coverage at the 1,000 word level was 89.95% for American movies and 88.94% for British movies. Table 3 shows that a vocabulary of 3,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words would provide 95.76% coverage and a vocabulary of 6,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words would provide 98.14% coverage of American movies. The results were similar for British movies. Assuming proper nouns and marginal words are known, a vocabulary of 3,000 word families would provide 95.50% coverage, and a vocabulary of 7,000 words would provide 98.29% coverage. This result suggests that there is little difference between American and British movies if 95% coverage is needed. However, American movies may be slightly less demanding than British movies if 98% coverage is needed.

The cumulative coverage including proper nouns and marginal words for the movies within each genre is shown in Table 4. The results indicated that the vocabulary necessary to reach 95% coverage was fairly consistent between the genres. Knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families and proper nouns and marginal words provided 95% coverage of eight of the eleven genres. Knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families provided the highest coverage of horror (96.37%), classic (96.23%), westerns (96.13%), and drama (96.10%). Knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families was needed to reach 95% coverage for war, animated, and action movies. There were larger differences in the vocabulary necessary to reach 98% coverage between the genres. The vocabulary size necessary to reach 98% coverage ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words. A vocabulary of the most frequent 5,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words was sufficient to reach 98% coverage of horror (98.17%), crime (98.07%), and drama (98.00%). The results indicate that at both 95% and 98% coverage, horror and drama may be the least demanding genres, needing the smallest vocabulary sizes to reach those coverage points. In contrast, a vocabulary of 10,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words is necessary to reach 98% coverage of animated movies indicating that animated movies may be the most demanding genre in terms of coverage, needing the largest vocabulary sizes to reach those coverage points.