Linguistic analysis of English books on environmentology

Recently, to confront environmental problems, a system of “environmentology” is trying to be constructed. In order to study environmentology, reading materials in English is considered to be indispensable. In this paper, we investigated several English books on environmentology, 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 environmentology have a similar tendency to literary writings in the characteristics of character-appearance. Besides, the values of the K-characteristic for the materials on environmentology are high, and some books are more difficult than TIME magazine.