A Corpus-based Study Of High-frequency Verbs In China’s English Newspapers

The development of the network and information technology promotes the globalization of English as well as its nativization. The localization of English in China has been controversial. Scholars have focused on the definition of "China English", and relatively little research has probed into particular lexical items on a corpus basis, especially in the Chinese context.This study examines the Selected Top Thirty Verbs (STTVs) in China’s English newspaper (China Daily), attempting to reveal the use of English in the Chinese context. It aims to address the following questions:1. How are high-frequency verbs nativized in China’s English newspapers with respect to the frequency, distribution and modification of senses?2. How are high-frequency verbs nativized in China’s English newspapers with respect to collocational patterns?3. How are high-frequency verbs nativized in China’s English newspaper with respect to grammatical features?It is a corpus-based study. The corpora adopted in the study were self-compiled MCCD (Micro Corpus of China Daily), data of which were obtained from the electronic version on the website (www.chinadaily.com.cn) and the newspaper sub-corpus of COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) with63,424,340tokens. MCCD consists of1,681articles with1,000,345tokens and31,460types, covering issues of economy, politics, culture, life, education, etc. Computer softwares (AntConc, Concordance Randomizer, PowerGREP, etc) are used to attain a wordlist of high-frequency verbs and randomly select concordance lines of the STTVs. Then senses, colligation and semantic features are annotated manually and analyzed.The major findings are:1) the senses of the STTVs covered in MCCD are different from those in COCA. For example, senses of develop and grow are fewer than those in COCA. The modification of senses manifested in terms of semantic extension is discovered in develop, senses of which differ from or go beyond the native use. Semantically speaking, the STTVs display neutral semantic prosody in both MCCD and COCA. But the frequency of each verb in the STTVs with positive semantic features is significantly higher in MCCD than that in COCA;2) The STTVs tend to co-occur repeatedly with certain nouns in MCCD. Such collocations reflect the status quo of China in a way, displaying Chinese economic reform and the development;3) Of the STTVs, grow as intransitive verb occurs more frequently in MCCD than in COCA. Develop and increase are less often used as transitive verb in MCCD than in COCA. There is also difference in colligation between the two corpora. Colligations frequently used in MCCD are closer to conventional syntactic structure of the Chinese language.This study might contribute to the existing literature and give a description of nativized use of high-frequency verbs in the Chinese context on an empirical basis. Furthermore, the study deepens our understanding of "China English".