Letters to the editor: A tale of two cities

Abstract

Letters to the editor are examples of an established sub-register of English in most newspapers printed all over the world. Although there are similarities in the format of these letters, there are differences due to linguistic, social, and cultural variations. The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast a number of such letters in two locations, Singapore and Los Angeles, to find out patterns of vocabulary and grammatical structures. The comparison shows that the letters cover a wide variety of topics and have similar format and distribution of content words with different degrees of evaluative language. In general, the Singaporean writers are more positive about their city than the LA writers and show more involvement in their letters by using personal pronouns. The data will consist of letters written to the editors of two well-known papers, The Straits Times of Singapore (SG) and The Los Angeles Times (LA).

Keywords:

• applied linguistics
• corpus linguistics
• sociolinguistics
• discourse analysis
• contrastive analysis

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mick O’Donnell for helping us with measuring the lexical density of the two data sets and also for some useful comments on the first draft of this paper. We would also like to thank F.J. Ghadessy and R.S. Ghadessy for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.