Pixel International Conferences

A careful examination of the frequencies of 97 linguistic features was performed for a Chinese corpus (over 19 million characters) including journal papers, research dissertations, magazine articles, and novellas (1,000 texts). Multidimensional analysis of the frequency data of linguistic features revealed five dimensions of language variation, and each was named after its language function, more specifically: (i) narrative discourse versus rational discourse, (ii) modification, (iii) reference, (iv) uncertainty, and (v) prudence. These five dimensions explained effectively over 52% of the total variance in the linguistic feature frequency data. Statistical tests were performed to compare the mean scores of the four registers in each dimension. The study found that written Chinese for academic and entertainment purposes varied greatly in each of the five dimensions, while journal papers and research dissertations only differed significantly from each other in the first and fifth dimensions. It was the first MDA study that set out to explore language variation in written Chinese for academic and entertainment purposes. Implications of the findings of this study were discussed.

Keywords corpus linguistics, multidimensional analysis, Chinese for academic purposes, Chinese for entertainment purposes, linguistic features

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