Conference article

Nowadays; approximately sixteen million Japanese travel abroad; and six million foreigners come to Japan for sightseeing. It can be said that it is just the time of sightseeing right now. Therefore; the knowledge of tourism has become more and more important; and reading materials in English that can be said to be a world common language has been indispensable. If we have beforehand enough knowledge of the features of English in this field; reading of the texts will become easier. In this paper; we investigated several English books on tourism; comparing with journalism in terms of metrical linguistics. In short; frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore; we calculated the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result; it was clearly shown that English materials for tourism have a similar tendency to literary writings in the characteristics of character-appearance. Besides; the values of the K-characteristic for the materials on tourism are high; and the books with older publication and with higher specialty are more difficult than journalism.

English style analysis; Metrical linguistics; Statistical analysis; Text data mining; Tourism