Corpus-based Chinese studies

Abstract

This article reviews corpus-based Chinese studies, both applied and theoretical, from the 1920s to the present. It will be shown that, while corpus-based Chinese studies have been gaining momentum for only the last couple of decades, the roots of Chinese corpus linguistics go all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. Today the bulk of corpus-based Chinese studies is oriented toward applied linguistics, with the compilation of frequency character/word lists and interlanguage Chinese studies being the most popular types of research. In addition to applied linguistic studies, this overview also highlights some innovative corpus studies on lexical and grammatical aspects of both classical and modern Chinese, as well as studies of sociolinguistic variation and discourse pragmatics. Overall, important groundwork in Chinese corpus linguistics is acknowledged and future directions are discussed.

The development of a Chinese vocabulary proficiency test (CVPT) for learners of Chinese as a second/foreign language

“…A representative pool of items was created according to the following guidelines (Figure 1). First, 304 items were deleted because their frequency could not be indexed in the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) Chinese Corpus (BCC) vocabulary frequency list based on a 15-billion-character corpus 2 (J. Xu, 2015; Xun et al, 2016).…”

“…First, 304 items were deleted because their frequency could not be indexed in the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) Chinese Corpus (BCC) vocabulary frequency list based on a 15-billion-character corpus 2 (J. Xu, 2015;Xun et al, 2016). These items were removed because grouping the advanced-level words into three bands is needed for selecting target words, ensuring that all target words were from the same vocabulary list.…”

The Expression of Epistemic Uncertainty Through the Use of Distal Demonstratives in Russian and Chinese: A Cognitive Analysis of Corpus Data

“…We chose this corpus because it is one of the largest task-oriented human-human dialog corpus for which speech data is freely available. On the paucity of large spoken corpora of Chinese see Xu (2015).…”