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Dimensions of Variation in
Written Chinese

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multidimensional

model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical methods and
two-dimensional visual representation, the book provides a concrete and objective
view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that
addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge
thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese
language.

Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor of Chinese at San Diego State University. He has

been a long-term editor of the Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association
(now known as Chinese as a Second Language) and is a respected researcher in
the field of Chinese linguistics.
Routledge Studies in Chinese Linguistics

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/rscl

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese

Zheng-sheng Zhang

Mandarin Chinese Words and Parts of Speech: Corpus-Based Foundational

Studies
Huang Chu-Ren, Keh-Jiann Chen and Shu-Kai Hsieh

Partition and Quantity: Numeral Classifiers, Measurement, and Partitive

Constructions in Mandarin Chinese ( forthcoming )
Jing Jin

Sino-Korean Phonology ( forthcoming)

Youyong Qian

Syntax-Phonology Interface: Argumentation from Tone Sandhi in Chinese

Dialects
Hongming Zhang

The Acquisition of Anaphora in Child Mandarin ( forthcoming)

Ruya Li

The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics ( forthcoming)

Yicheng Wu

The Processing, Learning, and Teaching of Chinese Characters ( forthcoming)

Yun Yao

The Semantics of Chinese Classifiers and Linguistic Relativity ( forthcoming)

Song Jiang
Dimensions of Variation in
Written Chinese

Zheng-sheng Zhang
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Zheng-sheng Zhang
The right of Zheng-sheng Zhang to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-94253-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67314-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is style? What is stylistic variation? 1
1.2 Stylistic variation in Chinese 2
1.3 The scope of the present study 7
1.4 Notable findings and characteristics 7
1.5 Theoretical and practical implications 9
1.6 Chapter guide 9

2 Critique of existing literature 12

2.1 Narrow focus 12
2.2 Conceptual fuzziness 13
2.3 Lack of empirical support 15

3 Corpora and search tools 18

3.1 Brown family corpora 19
3.2 Beijing Language and Culture University corpus (BCC) 22
3.3 Center for Chinese Linguistics corpus, Peking University (CCL) 24
3.4 Modern Chinese Frequency Dictionary (MCFD) 25
3.5 English corpora 25
3.6 Offline concordancers 26

4 Features selection, selected features and

frequency profiles 28
4.1 Feature selection 28
4.2 Selected feature frequency profiles 33
4.3 English features 65
vi Contents
5 Theoretical framework and correspondence analysis 74
5.1 Multi-feature, multidimensional framework for
register variation 74
5.2 Correspondence analysis (CA) 77

6 Two dimensions of stylistic variation in modern

written Chinese 85
6.1 Motivating the two dimensions with LCMC 85
6.2 Replication with other corpora 94
6.3 Independent support from Feng S. L. 104
6.4 Correspondence Analysis and Factor Analysis compared 105

7 Cross-linguistic comparison with English 109

7.1 COCA 109
7.2 Biber (1988) 114

8 Case studies 117

8.1 Finer differentiation of classical Chinese elements 117
8.2 Mixed compounds 120
8.3 Monosyllabic versus disyllabic 122
8.4 Morphological 124
8.5 (Near) synonyms 126
8.6 Classifier/measure words 130
8.7 Idioms 132

9 Theoretical issues and future directions 136

9.1 Chinese in the broader context 136
9.2 Contribution to general research on stylistic variation 136
9.3 Implications for grammatical analysis 138
9.4 Future directions 139

10 Practical implications 143

10.1 Implications for NLP 143
10.2 Pedagogical implications 143

Appendices 147
Index 161
Acknowledgments

Many individuals deserve my heartfelt appreciation for their role in this work.
I am deeply indebted to the late Richard Xiao, prominent corpus linguist at
Lancaster University. This book, indeed much of my work for the last few years,
would not have been possible without his help and inspiration. His dedication to
the field and devotion to colleagues and students is nothing short of legendary.
This book is dedicated to him.
I have benefited immensely from the trailblazing work of Shengli Feng of the
Chinese University of Hong Kong on the role of rhythm in stylistics and much of
Chinese grammar. The recent work on literary elements by the late Dejin Sun of
Beijing Language and Cultural University has also influenced the present work.
Deep appreciation goes to Hongyin Tao of UCLA, who has been instrumental in
more ways than he perhaps realizes himself. His pioneering work in the area of
register variation has been thought provoking.
Appreciation also goes to my colleagues at the Department of Linguistics and
Asian/Middle Eastern Languages at San Diego State University, including Eniko
Csomay and Robert Malouf, who have provided the much-needed moral support
and help with resources.
Zheng-sheng Zhang
September 2016
1 Introduction

It may well be an understatement that stylistic variation in Chinese has been an

under-researched area. Especially lacking in this area are empirical studies, and
intuition is still very much relied on in matters of stylistics. With the use of many
corpus and statistical tools, and ever ready to challenge unfounded assumptions,
this volume is an attempt to ameliorate the situation. While much of what is pre-
sented here needs to be taken as exploratory in nature, the author believes that the
empirical approach is the only way forward.
This volume is both a research monograph and a reference for teachers and learn-
ers of Chinese. As research, the book contributes to the still small literature that
applies the multi-feature, multidimensional framework of Biber (1988) to Chinese,
both confirming the cross-linguistic validity of the multi-feature, multidimensional
approach and providing an alternative analysis using the little-used statistical pro-
cedure of Correspondence Analysis (CA). For teachers and learners of Chinese, the
intuitive visualization of variation patterns may prove helpful for raising awareness
and sensitivity to stylistic differences and providing guidance to instruction, such as
the selection and sequencing of teaching materials and linguistic items.
This introductory chapter will first provide some background information
regarding stylistic variation in Chinese. The scope and several notable character-
istics of the present project will then be highlighted. Some theoretical and practical
implications will be discussed. Finally, the chapter structure of the book will be
laid out.

1.1 What is style? What is stylistic variation?

In this work, we will be using the term ‘style’ to refer to the characteristics of lan-
guage use. As pointed out by Wells (1960), there are two different ways to study
style – i.e., in a strictly descriptive manner or an evaluative manner. Being clearly
descriptive, the word ‘style’ used in this book should not be taken as imparting
any value judgment, as implied in the title of the venerable book Elements of Style
(Strunk & White 1923). We will be using stylistic variation to refer to the distinct
uses of language in different contexts, with different settings, purposes, topics, and
participants. We will also be using the term style interchangeably with register,
which may be more specific and technical.1
2 Introduction
It may be safe to say that stylistic variation exists in all languages, as evidenced
by the common reference to the basic distinction between spoken and written
styles in many languages. Stylistic differences can manifest themselves in dif-
ferent areas of language, including the syntactic and most notably the lexical
domain. There exist clear lexical doublets sharing the same referential mean-
ings but differing in stylistic characteristics. In English, for example, we find
lexical pairs such as dine versus eat, end versus finish, help versus assist, ask
versus inquire, begin versus commence representing more generally the ‘Latinate-
Germanic Divide’ (Bar-llan & Berman 2007), which tend to be used in different
registers. Syntactically, deviation from canonical word order, such as seen in
literary inversions (e.g., into the room came a rabbit, says he), may also repre-
sent stylistic choices. What say you, which means the same as what do you say,
meaning ‘what do you think’, has a fairly distinct stylistic value, being restricted
to spoken language, fiction and magazine, but missing entirely from newspaper
and scientific writing (COCA corpus). More subtly, as demonstrated by Biber
et al. (1999), even basic syntactic elements, such as parts of speech, can also be
shown to have stylistic values. Nouns and nominalized elements seem to have
close affinity with formal written texts.
While there is no need to belabor the obvious, the extent of stylistic variation
may not have been sufficiently appreciated. As noted recently by Liberman (2016),
even the use of the definite article is sensitive to register differences:

At every stage, writing that’s less formal has fewer THEs, and speech gener-
ally has fewer still, so to some extent the decline of THE is part of a more
general long-term trend towards greater informality. But THE is apparently
getting rarer even in speech, so the change is more than just the (normal) shift
of writing style towards the norms of speech.
(http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=23277)

1.2 Stylistic variation in Chinese

Stylistic differences can also be observed in Chinese, both lexically and syntacti-
cally. To begin with, pronounced differences between spoken and written styles
seem to be keenly felt in Chinese. Indeed the difference is so great that Li and
Thompson (1982) dubbed it a ‘gulf’.
The following general characteristics have been noted about written Chinese:

1 greater lexical variability

(Wang Y. 2003)
2 longer, more complex sentences and more explicit inter-clausal connectives
3 presence of classical lexical and syntactic elements
(冯禹 2000)
4 predominantly disyllabic rhythmic pattern
(冯胜利 2010)
 Introduction 3
5 use of light verbs with nominalized verbs: 进行 ‘carry out’ + 打击 ‘attack’
6 more foreign influences in lexicon and grammar

Much less though has been noted about variation within written Chinese, which is
the focal area of the present investigation.

1.2.1 Classical Chinese elements

Many classical style expressions can be found in modern Chinese, which have
often been associated with written Chinese, for understandable reasons. First of
all, for several millennia, classical Chinese was the written lingua franca for all
educated literati in China, before it was replaced with modern written Chinese
at the beginning of the last century. Second, classical elements are frequently
employed in formal texts such as invitations and official announcements. Third,
and last, clear stylistic doublets can easily be found contrasting classical Chinese
with their modern Chinese counterparts. The first things that come to mind are lexi-
cal doublets, such as 买 ‘buy’ versus 购 ‘purchase’ and 在 ‘at’ versus 于 ‘at’, which
show the same meanings expressed in distinct and paralleled fashions. Syntactic
doublets contrasting classical Chinese and modern Chinese elements can also be
found – for example, the spoken ‘在 + location +verb’ versus the written ‘verb +
于 + location’, both meaning ‘verb-ing at location X’.
Some classical Chinese constructions are less well known. As Feng Yu (2000)
noted, the ordering between measure phrase and nouns can be reversed. So instead
of 三幅图画 ‘three measure picture’, 图画三幅 with the numeral + measure phrase
moved to appear after the noun phrase is found in written style texts. Incidentally,
measure words, which are necessary in modern Chinese but not part of classical
Chinese, can also be left out in certain stylistic contexts.
It is important to point out that although classical elements may present the best-
known examples of stylistic contrasts, stylistic differences can be observed when
no classical elements are involved. We now go beyond classical elements to other
less noticed manifestations of style.

1.2.2 Grammatical elements

That grammatical structure is relevant to style may be surprising at first. Unlike
lexical items, we tend to have less intuition about the stylistic characteristics of
grammar. Although not readily intuitive, the frequency of occurrences of major
parts of speech can vary greatly in different types of text, as is shown in the corpus-
based grammar of English (Biber et al. 1999). Other grammatical elements can be
sensitive to style as well. Take the example of the Mandarin aspectual particle le,
both the verbal and sentential varieties, which are not found in classical Chinese.
刘月华等 (1983) pointed out that verbal le- is often omitted in journalistic writing,
despite its seeming obligatory occurrence in certain contexts; Li and Thompson
(1981) pointed out that the sentential le is generally not used in written expository
or descriptive prose.
4 Introduction
1.2.3 Lexical items
Seemingly, stylistically neutral lexical items can, nonetheless, be found to have
quite uneven distribution across the different registers. For example, the word 和
‘and’, which is neither classical in origin nor seems particularly colloquial or writ-
ten, has been found by our investigation to lean towards the written/literate end of
the spoken-written continuum.
With its predominance of disyllabic compounds, which often share identical
morphemes, the Chinese lexicon is particularly rich in synonyms and near syn-
onyms. Perhaps due to their minimal formal difference, distinguishing them can
be fairly challenging. Even native speakers are often caught using the wrong word,
as evidenced by their immediate self-repairs. The following are just some sets of
(near) synonyms that may be hard to distinguish:

女人、女子、女士、妇女 all translatable as ‘women’

买、购、购买 all translatable as ‘buy/purchase’
美丽、美, both rendered as ‘beautiful’
家庭、家, both rendered as ‘family’
许多、很多, both translatable as ‘many’
依旧、依然, both translatable as ‘still’
等待、等候, both translatable as ‘wait’

Because of the possible inherent association of lexical content with specific types
of texts, uneven distribution of specialized lexical items should not be surprising.
What will be noteworthy is the distinct distribution of words that have identical
or similar lexical content. The words in each group noted earlier seem to share
the same referential meanings, but they all have different distribution. The triplet
买、购 and 购买 is particularly intriguing. The English translation buy versus
purchase suggests a difference in style between 买 and 购. But what about 购买,
which contains the stylistically contrastive pair and is itself distributed differently
from both of its components?

1.2.4 Non-canonical usages

Headline grammar
Distinct stylistic characteristics can be observed in some conventionalized genres,
for example, newspaper headlines. Just as English can have Congress to pass
immigration bill, where the infinitive to is used in lieu of the future modal will,
along with the omission of an article for the noun phrase immigration bill, Chinese
may well have a headline such as 我奥运健儿悉尼夺金, in which 在 ‘at’ is omit-
ted before the location 悉尼 ‘Sydney’, along with abbreviations 奥运 (for 奧運
會 ‘Olympic games’) and 金 ‘gold’ (for 金牌 ‘gold medal’). Another example of
headline grammar is the use of object-noun phrases after intransitive verbs, such
as A 对话 B, instead of the more usual A 跟 B 对话 ‘A dialogs with B’.
 Introduction 5
Headlines can also provide the context for the highly context-dependent inter-
pretation of certain words. For example, the meaning ‘possible’ for 或, which
normally means ‘or’, seems mostly found in news headlines.

Internet neologisms
Anyone living in the twenty-first century cannot help but notice a barrage of new
‘Internet-isms’ that have sprouted up on the Internet. To attract eyeballs, indulge in
irreverent humor or simply for the fun of sheer novelty and shock value, numerous
neologisms have been created.
New expressions include 华丽转身 ‘a dazzling change’, 颜值 ‘good look, liter-
ary: face value’, 高大上 ‘of upper echelon’ and so on. There are also expressions
that seem directly taken from English, for example, 是时候了_____ ‘it is time
to_____’. Many faddish clichés have also come into the language, often alluding to
some events that are considered common knowledge but may totally elude outsid-
ers. For example, 你懂的 ‘you know what I mean’ alludes to the press conference
when a spokesperson used it to avoid saying something explicitly for reasons also
understood by the audience. Other examples include the following:

有一种 _____ 叫 _____ ‘there is a kind of _____ called _____’

是 _____ 的节奏 ‘it has the look of ______; literary: it is the rhythm of ______’
_____ 那些事 ‘those things from _____’
进入 ______ 模式 ‘start to ______; literary: enter the mode of______’
也是醉了‘become speechless; literary: also is drunk’

In addition to new creations, we also find the deliberate flaunting of correct pro-
nunciation, standard written representation and canonical rules and conventions.
Words have been deliberately mispronounced and written (偶 ou for 我 wo; 滴 di
for 的 de, etc.); conventional grammar is mangled (很 ‘very’ + nouns: eg. 很女
人 ‘very woman’, 很青春 ‘very youth’, 很英雄 ‘very hero’, 很趣味 ‘very inter-
est’; 不 ‘not’ + nouns: 不鸵鸟 ‘not ostrich’ and 不党员 ‘not party member’; the
English-induced 联系你 ‘contact you’ is now more common than 跟你联系; 宅
‘house’ becomes useable as a verb, 宅在家里 ‘cooped up at home’). Non-canon-
ical collocations/colligation can also be seen. Words and word classes that typi-
cally appear together are said to collocate/colligate with each other, respectively.
Distinct stylistic effects are achieved when rules of collocations/colligation are
blatantly flaunted. An example of atypical collocation is seen in the adjective/
adverb 严重 ‘serious(ly)’, which normally goes with only negative nouns such
as 问题 ‘problem’ or verbs such as 威胁 ‘threaten’. It is now found to occur
with 推荐 ‘recommend’, 同意 ‘agree with’, 感谢 ‘thank’ and 赞同 ‘agree with’.
As an example of atypical colligation, we may point to the unusual colligation
of personal pronouns modified by a 的 phrase, such as 十年后的我 ‘me in ten
years’. Although by no means ungrammatical, such combinations are definitely
stylistically marked.
6 Introduction
Apart from these deviations from the conventional norm, another interesting
phenomenon that has challenged the accepted wisdom is the liberal use, in blogs
and Internet literature in general, of literary (classical Chinese) expressions, which
otherwise have mostly been thought of as being exclusively associated with formal
writing. The veracity of this observation can be substantiated with corpora data
that contain blogs and tweets.
An interesting question for the present study is where the new Internet neolo-
gisms fit in the big picture of stylistic variation. Are they more spoken or written?
Do they have more affinity with literary, journalist or academic writing?

Regionalisms
With so many regional varieties in China, it is inevitable that some regionalisms
will find their way into written Chinese. The question we raised about the Internet
style can be asked for regionalisms as well. What kinds of writing tend to have
the most regional features?

1.2.5 Translational style

As Chinese written texts translated from other languages cannot but be considered
Chinese as well, any complete investigation of stylistic variation should include
the style of translational language too. Also, wouldn’t it be natural to wonder
if translated texts are appreciably different in style? It is also worth asking the
related question of whether there is any general stylistic difference between the
two languages involved, along the line of Xiao and McEnery (2010). Is Chinese
more verbal and concrete than western languages, as suggested by Link (2013) in
his recent book?
Although we are not aware of any direct stylistic comparisons between trans-
lational language and non-translational language per se, studies on the character-
istics of translational language do exist. In fact, Baker (1993) put forward three
universals regarding what happens in the process of translation: explication, sim-
plification and normalization, with the first two seemingly being due to the desire
to ensure information transfer and the last one the inevitable loss of stylistic dis-
tinctness. Translational Chinese may be distinct stylistically as well. According to
Hu (2006), translational texts exhibit lower TTR (type-token ratio), contain more
attributive modifiers but fewer formal words. Xiao and Hu (2015) found that the
light verb 进行 ‘carry out’ has a greater frequency of occurrence 999.7 per million
words against the 774.7 in Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) and
665.38 in UCLA Corpus of Written Chinese (UCLA). Furthermore, its distribution
is less skewed as in LCMC/UCLA, which is consistent with the observation of Xiao
and Hu that translational language is ‘flattened’.
In the present book, we will at times bring in data from translational Chinese
to contrast with native Chinese. More in-depth work in this area will have
to wait.
 Introduction 7
1.3 The scope of the present study
It should be made clear at the outset what the scope of the present work is and
what it does not address.
Despite the use of the more general term Chinese, only Mandarin will be focused
on in this work. As is well known, Chinese in fact includes a family of languages,
popularly known as ‘dialects’, which are in fact mutually unintelligible when spo-
ken but share the same script and much of the written language.
In the present work, the extensive regional variation will not be addressed. There
are a number of reasons for not including dialectal materials. To begin with, as will
be seen in Chapter 2, including dialects considerably complicates the matter, as the
contrasts between dialects will confound those between different styles within the
same dialect. Second, even though the spoken language varies a great deal from
dialect to dialect, for written language, the same standard core is shared by dialects,
mostly with the same set of written characters.
The related issue of change in style over time should be an interesting one,
especially since the written language of not too long ago was still classical Chi-
nese, which is very distinct. Although much reference will be made to classical
Chinese elements in modern Chinese, no systematic study of the change in style
will be attempted here.
In the present work, mainly variation in written Chinese will be covered.
Although variation can be found in spoken as well as written Chinese, the pres-
ent work does not deal with variation in spoken Chinese, as was done in Biber’s
original work (Biber 1988) on English. There are two reasons for the narrower
scope. The first logistical reason is the greater availability of written corpora at
this time. The second more substantive reason is to counter the previous tendency
to focus on the distinction between spoken and written Chinese, and to neglect the
variation within written Chinese.

1.4 Notable findings and characteristics

The present volume presents some new findings on stylistic variation in written
Chinese, based on the research the author has been carrying out for the last few
years, using the multi-feature and multidimensional framework of Biber (1988)
on register variation (Zhang 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016). Based on multiple written
Chinese corpora, using the statistical procedure of Correspondence Analysis, the
present work will demonstrate the following:

Stylistic variation in written Chinese is more extensive than previously

thought, and it cannot be captured by the well-known, non-written versus
written dichotomous distinction. By investigating the internal variation in
written Chinese, the present work presents a more fine-grained picture of
stylistic variation in Chinese, intuitively visualized made possible by Cor-
respondence Analysis.
8 Introduction
At least two dimensions are needed to account for stylistic variation in written
Chinese: a primary dimension of literateness, and a second dimension tentatively
dubbed literariness. This two-dimensional analysis is supported both by the model
independently arrived by Feng and the pilot studies with English.
The present work is distinct in the following ways:

1.4.1 Broadened scope

With few a priori assumptions, the present work tries to be open to all possible
manifestations of stylistic variation, whether or not they have been previously
noted. Unlike past research, the focus will no longer be just on 书面语 and the
classical Chinese elements, which have attracted the most attention.
The broadened scope also includes a cross-linguistic perspective and concern
with stylistic variation in general.

1.4.2 Multidimensional
Contrary to the widely assumed single dichotomous distinction between non-
written and written styles, the work will demonstrate that there are at least two
dimensions along which various genres and linguistic features are distributed.

1.4.3 Corpus based and quantitative

Most existing work on written Chinese relies heavily on introspection and is not
based on empirical evidence. The present work is based on the conviction that
introspection is not only limiting but also can be misleading. The use of corpus
material has yielded discoveries that cannot be achieved with intuition alone; it has
also corrected misimpressions that have been commonly accepted.
Most previous work does not use much statistics. If statistics are used at all, they
tend to be basic descriptive statistics such as percentages and averages. With the
use of more advanced statistical tools, we are able to be more fine-grained in our
quantitative analysis. Instead of dichotomous distinctions, continuous dimensions
can be entertained; quantitative information also allows us to evaluate the relative
importance of the different dimensions.

1.4.4 Use of correspondence analysis

Methodologically, the work also differs from previous research in the multi-
feature/multidimensional framework of register variation (a la Biber 1988)
with its use of Correspondence Analysis, rather than Factor Analysis. Although
Factor Analysis is commonly used in MM studies of register variation, it is
not as intuitive as Correspondence Analysis for interpretation and practical
applications. With its bi-plot visualization, a sort of stylistic “map”, the dis-
tributional patterns of linguistic features and genres along the two dimensions
can be intuitively seen. In addition to helping to clarify our understanding of
 Introduction 9
variation in written Chinese, the intuitive visualization will also aid the learning
and teaching of Chinese.

1.4.5 Cross-linguistic comparison with English

The present work is based on the assumption that register variation is a universal
linguistic phenomenon. Cross-linguistic comparisons may not only lend support
to our analysis but also contribute to the study of register variation in general.
The present work complements recent corpus-based works such as Xiao and
McEnery (2003, 2010) and Xiao and Hu (2015), which also involve cross-linguistic
comparisons of Chinese and English. The focus of their work is the contrasting
of the two languages without going into the internal variation in each language;
the present work compares the patterns of stylistic variation in the two languages,
which necessarily implies the concern with internal variation.

1.5 Theoretical and practical implications

There are theoretical as well as practical implications of the present work.
As pointed out by 陶红印 (1999), grammatical analysis can hardly proceed if
stylistic variation is not taken into consideration. Grammatical generalizations
often cannot be withheld across the board for all styles. Entertaining a style-
relative analytical approach may help solve some of the basic theoretical problems
in grammatical analysis.
Practically, a more explicitly explicated description of stylistic variation will
also be instrumental in solving some of the basic problems of the computational
processing of Chinese, such as word segmentation.
Insufficient awareness of the stylistic variation within written Chinese is a
great impediment to obtaining advanced proficiency in the language. Teachers of
Chinese may have a very vague notion of the distinction between spoken versus
written Chinese, as they may know even less about the internal variation between
the different kinds of written registers. Students who are otherwise proficient in
the spoken language may not develop sufficient sensitivity to style and produce
language that is totally inappropriate stylistically. Very few textbooks address the
issue of stylistics. Those that do are also mostly based on the dichotomous distinc-
tion of non-written versus written styles.

1.6 Chapter guide

The rest of the book is organized as follows. Please note that the book can also
be used for reference, to be read and used in a flexible manner, according to the
needs of the reader.
Chapter 2 summarizes the three main shortcomings of previous work on written
Chinese.
Chapter 3 is a description of the various corpora and search tools used in the
present work. The descriptions of the search options are fairly detailed so that
10 Introduction
interested readers can use them as resources in their own corpus work on written
Chinese.
Chapter 4 first discusses the various considerations used in feature selection.
It then presents the frequency profiles of the various types of selected features
across different kinds of texts. The longest chapter of the book, it can be consulted
separately as a reference work.
Chapter 5 on methodology may prove helpful to readers interested in starting
work using the MM framework and Correspondence Analysis.
Chapter 6 is the main presentation of the two-dimensional analysis, first with
the LCMC corpus and then with multiple replications using a number of different
corpora of various sizes and characteristics.
Chapter 7 is a cross-linguistic comparison with English data using the two-
dimensional analysis. Although fairly sketchy and tentative, it may spark interested
readers to pursue further work in this area.
Chapter 8 provides a more in-depth examination of a few selected cases, apply-
ing the two-dimensional analysis presented earlier. This chapter can also be used
alone as reference.
Chapter 9 summarizes the main contributions of the book and outlines a number
of possibilities for future research.
Chapter 10 discusses the pedagogical implications of the work.

Note
1 According to Halliday (1971), register describes the choices made by the user, depend-
ing on what the user is doing, who is taking part and the use to which the language is
being put.

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