A Corpus-based Study Of Syntactic Europeanization In Media Language From Chinese Mainland And Hong Kong

This thesis is a corpus-based comparative study of the degree of syntacticEuropeanization in the media language from Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong. Theobjective of the present study is to find out the media language of which region enjoyshigher degree of syntactic Europeanization and to explore the possible causes tointerpret the different degrees of Europeanization found in this study. In this way, thisresearch is expected to provide referential materials for the comparative study ofChinese varieties in Mainland and Hong Kong with a view to promoting the mutualunderstanding and exchanges between the two regions.In this research, the two self-constructed corpora of media language arecomparable in nature. The text sources are from electronic versions of authoritativenewspaper. Both corpora have the size of around200,000Chinese charactersrespectively, and each sample in the corpora ranges from200to1000characters. Thepublication dates of all these newspapers are from January to March in2013.Moreover, the texts in the corpora are balanced in topic, covering the fields ofart, industry, commerce, politics, etc.After text cleaning and part-of-speech tagging, texts are to be searched tocompare the degrees of syntactic Europeanization in each structure. Although thefrequency of each Europeanized structure can be counted with the help of theapplication antconc, follow-up Chi-square test is also carried out to see whether thedifference of syntactic Europeanization in the two corpora are statistically significantor not.The comparisons on the degrees of syntactic Europeanization of the medialanguage from Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong are made in three basic types:average sentence length, Europeanization in different word categories and specialEuropeanized structures. Under the three major types, thirteen specific Europeanizedphenomena are used as indications to judge which region enjoys a higher degree ofEuropeanization in media language. Among them, in eight indications ofEuropeanization, the media language in Hong Kong is more Europeanized. Thedegree of syntactic Europeanization is higher in Chinese Mainland corpus only in thecomparison of three Europeanized phenomena: emergent usage of conjunction如果,proliferation of the preposition “在”and change of emotive meaning of the被structure. In addition, the distributions of the two indications left are not significantlydifferent in the two corpora. Generally speaking, the degree of Europeanization in themedia language in Hong Kong is higher than that in Chinese Mainland.The possible causes for the difference can be traced to four aspects: politics,economy, social background and mentality. In terms of politics, the Chinese Mainlandhas long been in the situation of seclusion due to the policy of cutting off the countryfrom the outside world advocated by the Qing government and the diplomatic policyof leaning to one side in the initial period after the founding of PRC. But HongKong has a better opportunity of developing English since the Hong Kong British government promoted English education for its politic purpose. As for economy,Hong Kong enjoys a closer trade ties with western countries, and thus the impact ofEnglish on the Chinese variety there is greater. Moreover, from the perspective ofsocial background, the language contact of Chinese and English in Chinese Mainlandis mainly indirect since the medium is translated works. However, benefiting fromquite a number of foreign residents there, the language contact in Hong Kong coversboth direct and indirect form. Consequently, the influence of English on Chinese isstronger in Hong Kong. Finally, the mentality of citizens in Chinese Mainland isrelatively conservative to language, while the Hong Kong residents recognize Englishas the language of success and develop a worship of English. All the differences in thetwo regions help to explain the different syntactic Europeanization degrees in the tworegions.The author hopes the findings of the study can contribute to the comparativestudy of Chinese varieties in the two regions and offer some referential materials foreconomic and cultural exchanges between Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong.