A Look Into Lin Yutangs’ English Writings: A Linguistic Approach

The multi-identities of Lin Yutang as a writer, linguist and translatorhave drawn the attention of scholars and students to carry outresearches from different aspects, among which few try to analyze thelanguage alone in Lin Yutang’s English writings systematically. This thesiswill be the a tentative attempt to analyze the language in Lin Yutang’sEnglish writings by comparing and contrasting various languagefeatures quantitatively and qualitatively at grammatical, lexical andsyntactical levels with those of Qian Zhongshu to highlight the distinctlanguage features in Lin Yutang’s English writings.The findings of the research show that at the grammatical level,features indicating the informality of style such as the infinitive to andcoordinators appear more often in Lin Yutang’s English writings and Linalso seems to use more modal verbs and verbs indicating mentalprocess in his writings. The result can be explained by the fact that thetwo writings chosen are essays in genre which are rather informal instyle.At the lexical level, the lexical density is rather low which meansthat the writing style is informal and the repetition of words is relativelyhigh. Yet, this can be the result of the rhetorical devices used in writingto strengthen the force of the language. The vocabulary in Lin Yutang’sEnglish writings is mostly common and simple, belonging to the basicword stock. And most of the words appearing in Lin’s English writings areamong the vocabulary covering95%of the words of the native Englishspeakers.At the syntactical level, the variety of sentence types and differentforms of grammatical structures abound. This changing of grammaticalforms to express the same idea without resorting to the unnaturalchange of words is what Lin Yutang proposed about idiomatic expressions: not only at the lexical levels, but also at the syntacticallevels by adopting the commonly used sentence structures.Although at the lexical level, the richness of the vocabulary is ratherlow, the changing of syntactical patterns is a great effort on theauthor’s part to realize the idiomatic expressions at different layers oflanguage.