A Study On English Clusters With Chinese Characteristics In The Chinese Government Documents

Government documents are the records of the development in various fields such as politics, economics, and cultures, which are concentrated collections of information about people's life. To get more information about China's development and government policies, it is a wise choice for people at home and abroad to review the Chinese government documents (CGD). The language of Chinese government documents is carefully revised with high accuracy. Many expressions with unique Chinese characteristics can be found in these documents.CGD researches trigger the interests of many scholars. However, studies in the field of corpus linguistics are few. The present research is a corpus-driven study on keywords and keyword clusters. English and Chinese Parallel CGD corpus both in come into existence by downloading materials from China government official website. These materials include Chinese government work report and Chinese government White Paper released by the State Council of the People's Republic of China from the year 2000 to 2011. Software such as WordSmith, Paraconc and Moonpad are employed in the data processing. Keyword Clusters with 2 to 8 words in the corpus are extracted and analyzed.The keywords which can represent the topics and main content of the CGD analyzed. The semantic fields included in these documents are also displayed, which cover economic, the people's livelihood, legal system as well as domestic and foreign policy. The public concerns and different emphases on government policies in each year are discussed as well by viewing positive and negative keywords in each year. Moreover, a keyword cluster list consisting of 1659 clusters are generated. These clusters are investigated against the Google search to show that all these clusters are highly co-occur with CHINA or CHINESE, proving that these clusters are with distinct Chinese characteristics. The findings may echo the claim of China English in terms of vocabulary.The analysis of keywords can help the readers or listeners to get the main idea of government documents. The inequitable keywords of each year can indicate the public concerns and different emphases on government policies. Besides, the analysis of clusters with Chinese characteristics in the CGD can add plenty of materials for English teaching. It will become a reference for English learners as well as translators.