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Article published In: Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 15:1 (2024) ► pp.73–104

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Colloquialism and genre variation in Chinese

A corpus-driven study

ORCiD logo with link | Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Published online: 16 October 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.21010.li
Abstract
Colloquialization has been identified as one of the most crucial change processes of the English language, through which written genres gradually shift towards spoken styles. Colloquialism refers to the synchronous features resulting from colloquialization. There is limited research into the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese or how Chinese colloquialism manifests in different spoken and written genres. To extract the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese, this study used a corpus-driven approach to determine and compare keywords and phrase frames from two training Chinese corpora and those keywords and phrase frames with higher frequencies were retained for further testing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Colloquialism in Chinese
  • 3.Corpora and methodology
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Delimiting colloquial features in Chinese
      • 3.2.1Training to determine the categories of positive keywords and key phrase frames
      • 3.2.2Testing to verify the significance of positive keywords and key phrase frames
    • 3.3Cluster analysis of colloquial features in each genre
  • 4.Colloquialism and genre variation
  • 5.Discussion of the colloquial features in each group
    • 5.1Colloquialism of genres in the left branch
    • 5.2Colloquialism of genres in the right branch
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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