A Contrastive Study Of Chinese Vocabulary Between China And Singapore In Late Qing Dynasty And Early Republic Of China

This article builds a more than 110,000-word corpus focused on advertising corpora from SHUN PAO and LAT PAU of 1911 and 1912,including 80,000 words from SHUN PAO(675 issues)and 30,000 words from LAT PAU(630 issues).This paper tries to analyze the differences of Chinese vocabulary between China and Singapore and explain the reasons for the differences from the following five aspects: nouns,quantifiers,verbs,adjectives and time words.The study considers that the differences between the two papers are mainly manifested in four types: heteromorphic synonyms,homonyms,distinctive words and the frequency of use of the same word.There are five causes of the differences: the first is the influence of social environment,the second is the influence of dialect words,the third is the influence of foreign words such as English and Malay,the fourth is the influence of government policies,and the last is the individual factors such as personal language habits and political attitudes of editors.It's known that the Singapore Chinese vocabulary has formed a style that has both Chinese characteristics and its own characteristics,especially accompanied with the transformation of dialects into lingua franca during this period.In this study,we also found that the great changes in Chinese society,especially the 1911 Revolution,also had a major impact on Singaporean Chinese society.