The lexical variation among different Chinese communities in 1990's (Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan)

The 80's and 90's have been a remarkable period for the Chinese, on the mainland, in Taiwan and in Hong Kong alike. During the period great changes have taken place, in the political, economic and cultural arenas as well as in people's daily life. All these changes have their reflections in the Chinese language as information carrier, notably the Chinese words.; The concern of the present thesis is at once synchronic, as it presents the current state, and diachronic, as it tries to capture the change over the two decades. Horizontally the thesis looks at the three-Chinese communities on the mainland, in Taiwan and in Hong Kong respectively. It tries to identify the common base and the differences on the surface.; The data presented in the thesis are derived primarily from the Chinese language corpus of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, containing over 5,000,000 character “tokens” and over 60,000 word “types” or entries, and secondarily from the author's own collection.; The thesis benefits from the methods practised in the various sub-fields in the broad area of language studies, including descriptive linguistics, contrastive linguistics and socio-linguistics, as well as traditional Chinese lexicology and dialectology.; The thesis consists of 7 chapters.; Chapter 1 states the aim, approach and method of the thesis and briefly reviews work in the area in question.; Chapter 2 analyses the current state of the lexicon in all three communities and identifies a common base.; Chapters 3–6 trace the development of the sub-lexicons for the three communities, including their comparison and interaction. Thus Chapters 3, 4 and 5 look at the development on the mainland, in Hong Kong and in Taiwan respectively, while Chapter 6 describes the interaction among the three communities.; Chapter 7, the last chapter, summarizes the thesis by listing out the main findings and speculates on the future development of the Chinese lexicon.