A Study on Chinese Quantitative Stylistic Features and Relation Among Different Styles Based on Text Clustering

Abstract

The corpora for this study are from News Co-broadcasting, Daily Conversations and Behind the headlines with Wentao, each of which represents the formal written style, the colloquial style and the conversational style respectively. Sentence length, word length, part of speech (POS) and sentence-initial word POS are selected from the pre-processed corpora as features to generate text vectors and then clustered with PAM (partition around medoids) and Ward algorithms. The clustering results show: (1) It is reasonable to select sentence length, word length, POS and sentence-initial word POS as Chinese quantitative stylistic features. (2) Style is a polarized continuum, as the formal written style and the colloquial style display bipolar distributions while the conversational style lies in between and is near the pole of the colloquial style.

A discourse analysis of the macro-structure, metadiscoursal and microdiscoursal features in the abstracts of research articles across multiple science disciplines

“…While metadiscoursal features like boosters can underpin rhetorical certainty, other linguistic features can give rise to different writing styles such as formal, conversational and colloquial styles [ 17 , 26 ]. Quantitative analysis of linguistic features can be performed through examining the sentence length, word length, parts of speech (POS), number of noun-beginning, pronoun-beginning and WH-pronoun beginning sentences [ 26 ].…”

“…While metadiscoursal features like boosters can underpin rhetorical certainty, other linguistic features can give rise to different writing styles such as formal, conversational and colloquial styles [ 17 , 26 ]. Quantitative analysis of linguistic features can be performed through examining the sentence length, word length, parts of speech (POS), number of noun-beginning, pronoun-beginning and WH-pronoun beginning sentences [ 26 ]. Formalization or formality in science research articles is exhibited in the frequent use of nouns and prepositional phrases at the beginning of sentences and the use of longer sentence structures [ 17 , 23 , 26 , 27 ].…”

“…Quantitative analysis of linguistic features can be performed through examining the sentence length, word length, parts of speech (POS), number of noun-beginning, pronoun-beginning and WH-pronoun beginning sentences [ 26 ]. Formalization or formality in science research articles is exhibited in the frequent use of nouns and prepositional phrases at the beginning of sentences and the use of longer sentence structures [ 17 , 23 , 26 , 27 ]. On the other hand, a conversational style of writing includes the use of first person pronouns (e.g.…”

“…On the other hand, a conversational style of writing includes the use of first person pronouns (e.g. “I” and “you’ to address readers), pronoun-beginning and WH-pronoun beginning sentences, contractions, and imperative structures [ 17 , 26 – 28 ]. Abstracts also frequently use the third person and passive voice [ 20 ].…”

“…In contrast, informality can be employed by researchers to show a willingness to negotiate claims of knowledge and to acknowledge subjectivity of some claims [ 15 ]. Since there is a dearth of literature on how formalization is used in science abstracts, we filled this gap by drawing on previous research studies’ [ 17 , 26 ] quantitative analyses of linguistic features that manifested formalization in texts, whereby we mainly examined such formalization features exhibited in high-impact abstracts across multiple science disciplines and comparing the interdisciplinary variations in a contemporary context.…”