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Corpus-based Study on Nativized Features of Noun Patterns in China's English Newspapers

Author: ZhangChao
Tutor: LiWenZhong
School: Henan Normal
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: China English nativized features nouns
CLC: H314
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2013
Downloads: 61
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Abstract

With the rapid development of studies on “World Englishes” in recent years, the nativizationof English is generally acknowledged by academia. However, the nativization of English in Chinahas still been controversial. The debates have focused on whether “China English, i.e. Englishused in China’s Context” has developed to a normative and systematical language system. Most ofprevious relative researches were conducted mainly on the theoretical level, and lackedexperimental studies by a large margin. China Daily is the unique national English newspaper ofChina issued to communicate with the outside world. By taking the domestic political newsreports of China as the research objectives, this study discusses the use of English in China’scontext and addresses the following research questions:(1) What are the nativized features ofnouns’ uses in China’s political news reports?(2) What are the patterns of such nativization interms of local meaning and cultural expressions in the texts under examination?The study adopts a corpus-based approach which is both quantitative and qualitative. DoingCorpus-based studies have marked the significant shift of language research and learning both inmethodology and ideology. Two corpora are used in this study: China’s Political News Corpus(CPNC) and Native English News Corpus (NENC). The former is the observation corpus foranalyzing nativized features of China English, the latter is reference corpus. Both of corpora areconstructed by political news reports, so the analysis and results are more credible and valid. Themajor findings are summarized as follows:1) The main linguistic characteristics of top five abstract nouns (TFANs): On collocation,CPNC tens to use more recurrent collocations than NENC on the whole. By inspection of TFANs,there are great differences between two corpora in their adjective and verbal collocates. The highfrequency and unique collocations in CPNC reflect China’s social reality, the reform anddevelopment of current China in politics, economy, diplomacy and society. On grammar, nounphrases occur high-frequently in CPNC, which occupy a dominant proportion. In addition, CPNCtends to use the relatively fixed colligation “V.+(modifiers) N.+Prep.+Nouns….” Thisgrammatical structure in CPNC may be due to the Chinese way of thinking. On semantic meaning, most of collocates of TFANs possess semantic preference. Moreover, the high frequencycollocations tend to positive semantic prosody, which maybe indicate that China’s English newsreports are fond of spreading good news. It may because China has attempted to build an activeand a positive national image in the international stage.2) By investigating of the relationship between keywords and thematic intentions, there areplenty of nativized names in CPNC: the special Chinese names of people, places, institutions andothers. They are nativized by means of Chinese borrowings, semantic shifts or preference,abbreviations, shared words and so on.This research is a trial supplement for the previous study. It has dual significances both intheoretical and practical levels. With respect to the theoretical contributions, it comprehensivelydescribes the nativization of English in China’s context, strengthens the cognitions andacknowledgements on "China English". In relation to practical significances, it has importantimplications for cultivating the confidence and ability of intercultural communication.

Corpus-based Study on Nativized Features of Noun Patterns in China's English Newspapers

Abstract

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