A Corpus-driven Contrastive Study of the Top 100 Content Words in English and Chinese
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Abstract
- This corpus-driven study examines the construction and
frequency distribution of the top 100 most frequently used content words in
American English, Chinese, and American and Chinese first-year students’
compositions. First, this paper presents the top 100 most frequently used
content words in American English and Chinese from two comparable
corpora, i.e., the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and
the Chinese National Corpus (CNC). Second, the top 100 most frequently
used content words were drawn from two specific corpora consisting of
American and Chinese freshmen’s English compositions. Linguistic
similarities and differences in terms of the usage of content words across
the two sets of comparable corpora were identified. For example, the results
showed that people from both American and Chinese cultural backgrounds
relied heavily on verbs and nouns in their languages. However, Chinese
people tended to prefer using direction-oriented nouns and food-related
words, which were nearly absent in the COCA and American freshmen’s
compositions. The cultural implications associated with the linguistic
similarities and differences are discussed and pedagogical implications of
the findings are also offered.
| Title | A Corpus-driven Contrastive Study of the Top 100 Content Words in English and Chinese |
|---|---|
| Creator | Luo, Han |
| Kang, Tingting | |
| Publisher | Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching |
| Academic Department | Languages and Literary Studies |
| Division | Humanities |
| Organization | Lafayette College |
| Date Issued | June 2020 |
| Date Available | 2021-07-09 |
| Type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Keyword | contrastive analysis |
| content words | |
| corpus | |
| English language | |
| culture | |
| Chinese language | |
| Bibliographic Citation | Kang, T. and H. Luo (2020 Jun). "A Corpus-driven Contrastive Study of the Top 100 Content Words in English and Chinese." Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching 11 (1): 36-56. |
| Standard Identifier | Handle 10385/vx021g58g |
| Permalink | http://hdl.handle.net/10385/vx021g58g |
| Rights Statement |
In Copyright
|
| Rights Holders | Luo, Han |
| Kang, Tingting |
Contains
| File | Kang-JournalofTechnologyandChineseLanguageTeaching-vol11-2020.pdf | Uploaded 2021-07-09 | Public | Download |
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