A Probe Into China English

With the acceleration of globalization, English spreads quickly worldwide. As a result,non-native English varieties have appeared and developed their own linguistic features.Whether China has developed its own English language variety on the basis of Standard English, has become a focus among scholars. Since the 1980s, linguists have begun to discuss and explore the existence of "China English" variety. Up to now,many researches of "China English" have been made. As a whole, scholars mainly focus on the following aspects: whether "China English" exists or not; the definition of "China English"; whether"China English" is an English variety or not. Meanwhile,most scholars have reached a consensus on its linguistic features in phonology, lexis, sentence and discourse. However,most researches make surveys just based on limited language phenomena or some examples,which cannot justify the existence of "China English" variety with quantificational evidence.As an important branch of stylistics, functional stylistics which arose in the 1970s sees language in social and cultural context and takes meaning expression as its core of research.Up to now, functional stylistics has been applied in many researches which mainly include two directions--literary style and practical style. As a typical practical style, editorial has its own genre features in some respects, which may display the language and cultural features.In terms of editorial research, scholars mainly focus on the following perspectives: the difference between editorial and news genre; the stylistic features of editorial from field,tenor and mode; cultural features through editorial analysis. However, there are rare researches which combine editorial features with language variety.In recent years, corpus-based approach has provided a new way for scholars to study language features. With the framework of functional stylistics theory and a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, this thesis, based on the data taken from the two self-built corpora composed of English newspaper editorials, aims to justify the existence of the so called "China English" through the perspective of sentence length, passive voice predicates and logical connectors.The research is to analyze the stylistic features of editorials in the perspective of sentence and to explore the existence of "China English" variety. The findings show that:1) In terms of sentence length, there is a significant difference between the two corpora. The result shows that the mean sentence length of the non-native corpus is obviously longer than that of the native corpus,which is influenced by Chinese writing styles, large amount of information of editorials and Chinese teaching mode.2) In terms of passive voice predicates, there is a significant difference between the two corpora. The result shows that the number of passive voice predicates of the non-native corpus is larger than that of the native corpus. The reasons for this phenomenon are that:first, as advanced English learners, English editorialists from China are affected by English grammar. Second, passive voice predicates show that there is close relationship between interpersonal meaning and the use of passive voice from the perspective of functional linguistics.3) In terms of the using logical connectors,there is a significant difference between the two corpora. The result shows that the ratio of logical connectors use of the non-native corpus is slightly higher than that of the native corpus. The result is caused by English writing styles of English learners in China and Chinese high-context cultures.The theoretical significance lies in that the present study demonstrates an availability of applying the functional stylistics theory to the analysis of "China English" variety.Furthermore, the significance of application is that the study combines quantitative methodology of corpus linguistics with qualitative methodology of functional stylistics,which provides a new way and perspective to explore "China English" variety.