A Contrastive Study On The Lexical Chunks In The English Version Of The Report On The Work Of The Chinese Government And The State Of The Union Address Based On Corpora

Lexical chunks, with the advantages of storage, extraction and application as a whole, refer to the word strings, reserved in the brains, of high frequency and fixed forms and meanings. They can be altered holistically or partially and then are put into practical study by learners. Consequently, lexical chunks have received increasingly concern in recent years, on which numerous scholars conducted a large number of researches and extensive explorations.Studies abroad began with the discussion on the description, definition and classification of Lexical Chunks, falling into two main directions:the characteristics of LC in the same language (Biber.et.al,1999,2004; Cortes 2004,2006;Hyland 2008a,2008b) and the comparison of the usage between the mother tongue and the second language (Chen & Baker 2010; Adel & Erman 2012). Researches on LC domestically emerged at the beginning of the 21st century, mainly focusing on the introduction and empirical studies of LC. With the development of Corpus Linguistics, researches on lexical chunks get more achievements. Holistically, two features were presented in the researches based on Corpus Linguistics:the characteristics of LC in relative texts through the analysis of corpora and the analysis of second language acquisition based on Corpus Linguistics (Yue & Luo 2013). However, it still lacks the contrastive studies on specific texts especially the researches on RWG (Report on the Work of Chinese Government) and SUA (State of the Union Address).With the application of Antconc3.4.3, this paper selects the texts of the RWG and the SUA from 2012-2014 and establishes corpora respectively. To start with, the qualified Four-word Lexical Chunks are extracted by Antconc3.4.3 from the corpus of the RWG and that of the SUA respectively, and then they are divided into different types according to their structures and functions, and finally, an analysis of the relationship between structure and function of the lexical chunks of four words in the two corpora is conducted to probe the characteristics, similarities and differences.The researches illustrate that though the RWG and the SUA belong to political texts, there exist obvious diversities between them in structures and functions. Structurally, the RWG depends more on structures of noun phrases while the SUA prefers verbal structures; on function, referential expressions are dominant in both of the RWG and the SUA. In particular, the RWG shows a greater reliance on referential expressions while the SUA employs more stance expressions, indicating that the RWG is written-like while the SUA is oral-like. Besides, there are close relations between their functions and structures, in which a specific function is always achieved by a certain structure, such as the stance expressions are often realized by verbal phrases, while referential expressions mainly by noun phrases, and the organizational functions of the text depend always on chunks of subordinate clauses. As a result, the application of LC in the texts reveals directionality and stability quality, reflecting their convenience and superiority for foreign language learning as stable or semi-stable forms, which provides new methodology and method for translation studies of political texts and teaching.