A Contrastive Analysis Of Stylistic Features Of English Weblogs Of Native Speakers And Chinese

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics, which applies the theory and methodology of modern linguistics to study style and aims at revealing the expressive effect and the communicative function of language in specific context. Along with the drastic speed of the Internet development, computer-mediated communication has become more and more popular and many linguists have drawn attention to the language variety of netspeak. Weblog is the new genre of CMC, and it is a frontier research topic. A few researches on weblogs have been done from the perspective of stylistics, among which most focus on the native speakers'English blogs while few have paid attention to English blogs of Chinese. It is urgently needed to make a systematic analysis of weblog language using the theory and methodology of stylistics.The study chooses thirty English blogs of native speakers from foreign websites and thirty English blogs of Chinese from civil websites randomly as data corpus. This thesis first intends to make a contrastive study of stylistic features of English weblogs of native speakers and Chinese relating to daily life topics from the perspective of linguistic description, that is, phonological level, graphological level, lexical level, syntactic level, and semantic level to see the similarities and differences of stylistic features between the two kinds of blogs. Then the study explores the reasons for the stylistic features of the sample blogs from the contextual factors analysis and gives the reasons for the differences of stylistic features from other factors.Linguistic description shows as follows: At phonological level, there are many cases of sound elision, a lot of onomatopoeias, and different sound patterns in English blogs of native speakers while a few ones can be found in these aspects in English blogs of Chinese. At graphological level, many misspellings, a few end-elisions, many cases of decapitalizations, diverse and irregular paragraphing and spacing exist in English blogs of native speakers and Chinese. However, quite a lot of non-standard spellings, apostrophe omissions, particular punctuation marks in repetition form, round brackets and dashes, capitalization and other foregrounding ways, and emoticons exist in English blogs of native speakers while a few ones can be seen in the English blogs of Chinese. At lexical level, verbal repetition exists in the two kinds of blogs. But netcronyms, colloquial words and taboo words are in large number in English blogs of native speakers while there are only a few ones in the English blogs of Chinese. At syntactic level, extensive use of phatic communions, declarative sentences dominates the sample blogs and the rest are proliferated with much more other sentence types: interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentences in the two kinds of blogs. However, there are more minor and simple sentences than multiple sentences in English blogs of native speakers while more multiple sentences than minor and simple sentences in English blogs of Chinese. And there are much more grammatical mistakes in English blogs of Chinese than in blogs of native speakers. At semantic level, different figures of speech are used in the two kinds of blogs, e.g. parallelism, hyperbole, metaphor. By analyzing and contrasting from the above aspects we can see that although in written form, blog language of native speakers and Chinese has a hybrid property of both written and spoken English. And the language in native speakers'blogs is more colloquial than the one in English blogs of Chinese, which is fully manifested in the aspects of sound elision, onomatopoeia, colloquial and taboo words, minor and simple sentences. And the language in English blogs of native speakers is more informal than the one in English blogs of Chinese, which is reflected in the aspects of non-standard spelling, apostrophe omission, reiteration of punctuation, the use of dashes and round brackets, capitalization and paralinguistic devices.This study analyzes the reasons for the stylistic features of the sample blogs from perspectives of field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. Daily topics, equal, open, and safe relationship between the bloggers and the audiences, visual channel limitation, audience interaction, unprepared, the setting can be public or private and it doesn't matter the language. All of above factors conduce to the hybrid property of weblogs. In addition, there are some differences in the stylistic features of the two kinds of sample blogs. The reasons for the differences may not result from the contextual factors, but may be explained by the following factors: For native English speakers English is their mother tongue and the main purpose for blogging may be communication and make friends only. So any deviant forms can be understandable. They can write in any way they like. However, for Chinese English is a foreign language and the purposes for blogging might at least have two---communication and improvement of their English level. What's more, English weblog is in its early stage of development in China. It hasn't matured yet.The study can be significant in many aspects, better understanding weblog language, promoting development of weblog and stylistics, applying in English education, e.g. aiding cross-culture communication, spoken English, English writing and English reading teaching and learning.