A China-related English Corpus-based Study On The Formation And Idiomaticity Of China-specific Referents And Expressions

China is the second largest economic body in the world and it is on its way tobecome a powerful country. Language and culture represent the soft power of acountry. We are supposed to promote Chinese language and at the same time tointroduce Chinese culture by English. When English is used to express Chineseculture, we call it China-related English, which is an important subset of ChinaEnglish.China English is a variety of English, which bears its own features. The mostsalient feature of China English shows in its lexis. There are many China-specificreferents and expressions (CSREs) in China English. These CSREs show the featuresof both Chinese language and Chinese culture. So it is of great importance to studythem.In order to study China-specific referents and expressions, we resort to theChina-related English Corpus (CREC), which is under construction. CREC has twosub-corpora: Sub-corpus1(SCI) collects texts written by Chinese while Sub-corpus2(SCII) by foreigners. We extracted1249CSREs from CREC.We examined the idiomaticity of CSREs and found the idiomaticity of generalCSREs is related to their frequency and distribution in CREC. Then we analyzedthese CSREs from the perspectives of phonetics, word formation, semantics andpragmatics. Finally, we applied the findings to dictionary-making and languageteaching.