A Corpus-based Study Of Linguistic Features Of Amy Tan’s Novels

Chinese American literature is an important research field at home and abroad.Writers in this field are endowed with dual cultural identity and horizon,which are embodied in their works and are presented by different language,among whom Amy Tan is a representative one during the flourishing period of Chinese American literature.Her works like the Joy Luck Club and the Kitchen God’s Wife are well-known in the literary world.Recently,the linguistic turn of literary studies and the vigorous development of corpus linguistics have brought a significant change and formed a new research paradigm in literary studies,namely corpus-based literary studies.This thesis adopts the paradigm and conducts a synthetic and objective study of linguistic features of Amy Tan’s novels.Two corpora are needed in this study.The observed corpus includes six novels by Amy Tan,and the reference corpus was built on the basis of fiction sub-corpus in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.Based on the stylistic checklist by Leech and Short,a corpus-based contrastive study was conducted to reveal the linguistic features of Amy Tan’s works at the lexical,syntactical,and textual levels and the realization of literariness.The findings indicate that Amy Tan’s works have the inclination of lexical simplicity at the lexical level,and the high-frequency words are closely related to the novel’s themes and the protagonist’s personality.At the syntactical level,sentences in her novels are longer but of loose structure and in which the passive voice is less frequently used as the language is influenced by the characters’ gender and identity in her works.At the textual level,the temporal conjunctions and first-person pronouns are more frequently used by the narrator to show the clear chronological sequencing and simple internal textual organization,so as to create an intimate reader-narrator relationship and to promote the development of plot.The literariness of Amy Tan’s novels is realized in her own different ways.One is the more colloquial and simple language in her novels compared with that of the works of the same period.The other is the mother-daughter theme interwoven with cultural differences.The simple language and distinctive themes make Amy Tan’s novels stand out among the contemporary works,become literary works.