A Study On China English Through The Adjective Collocations In China Daily News Reports

Since the term "China English" was coined in the1980s, the research on China English has lasted for more than three decades, during which time, China English experienced rounds of doubts about its identity. Finally, through the efforts of China English researchers, the status of China English was finally widely recognized at the beginning of this century. At present, the research on China English has stepped into a new era when various linguistics approaches are being explored. Besides, China English studies have also combined with other disciplines of linguistic researches. One of the branches of studying China English is the localization of English in China. Like the fate of China English research, study on the localization of English in China endures doubts at the moment the concept was invented. Thus, adequate evidence ought to be provided to prove this actual linguistic trend in China. This paper intends to prove the process by examining the high frequent adjective collocations in the news reports from China Daily.By applying stratified sampling, the paper collects1800news reports from the four columns of China Daily, China, World, Business and Sports. After "cleaning" these texts, a corpus,"Mini China Daily Corpus"(MCDC) is established containing the texts collected from the newspaper. Next, all the words in the corpus are ranked in a descending order according to their occurrence in the corpus with the help of AntConc, a search tool of corpus. After that, all the high frequent descriptive adjectives are extracted from the list and their frequencies in the corpus will also be calculated. To ensure the accuracy of the study, the paper also searches the frequencies of these descriptive adjectives in another corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to compare with their frequencies in MCDC. Subsequently, according to the results, top14descriptive adjectives will be researched in MCDC, along with their "adjective+noun" collocations. Finally, these collocations will be compared with those in COCA and the differences in the usage in the two corpora will be analyzed in terms of broader aspects like culture, history, customs, etc. Four main steps are involved in the research process of the study. First, the construction of Mini China Daily Corpus (MCDC). Second, generation of the high frequent descriptive wordlist in MCDC compared with COCA. Third, search of the "adjective+noun" collocations in MCDC and comparison of same collocations in COCA. Fourth, discussion of the causes of the differences of the collocations in two corpora and exploration of the causes of the differences in a broad sense in terms of culture, history, etc. Finally, based on the findings, the paper will further discuss the implications the results have brought on English teaching in China and its correlation with language, society and culture.In the end, the author finds out that the differences of the same descriptive adjective collocations in usage in the two corpora lie in three main types, namely, the high frequent adjective collocations in MCDC compared with COCA, the unique collocations in MCDC and some other special usages in MCDC. The causes of the differences are various. For example, for the high frequent collocations in MCDC compared with COCA, most of them are closely related with politics and economy, and some have even been changed in meaning. On the whole, they represent the current focus of Chinese society; for the unique collocations in MCDC, many of them originate from the unique organizations, institutions or societal phenomena in Chinese society. Some of them reflect the language tendency, cultural background and ideology of the users in China and some are just translated from Chinese. In addition, some special usages share certain characteristics, for example, they are relatively stable in practical commutation and some are even broadened or narrowed in meaning in actual contexts. These findings are capable of proving that the English used in China has been localized by the users to some extent. In other words, at least at lexis level, the localization of English in China actually occurs.