A corpus-based approach to Chinese English study——Pinning down the ‘Chineseness’ and implications for creative writing in English in China

ABSTRACT

There has been limited research on Chinese English literature (CEL) in the domain of contact literatures. This article reports on a study of a representative Chinese English (CE) literary work well received by a worldwide audience – Qiu Xiaolong’s Enigma of China. With the aim of exploring CE by analysing the unique ‘Chineseness’ in this CE literary work from the paradigms of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, the language innovations and sociocultural meanings embedded in different levels of the work are examined. Further, by adopting a corpus-based approach and conducting keyword analysis, a number of language innovations were identified. These included the use of innovative hybrid compounds at the lexis level, the use of hybrid Chinese sentences of parallelism at the syntax level, and the use of discourses on political ideology and employment of ancient Chinese poems at the level of discourse pragmatics. It is argued that these language innovations are manifestations of a transfer of traditional Chinese culture norms and political ideology. The question of how to integrate CE corpus into courses on English creative writing in China is also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese English literature
• corpus-based approach
• language innovations
• sociocultural meanings
• creative writing in English

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A world-famous American weekly trade news magazine that targets publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents.

2. The majority of the place names (e.g. ‘Shanghai’, ‘Beijing’, etc.) and personal names (e.g. ‘Chen’, ‘Zhou’, etc.) were eliminated in the current study, except one of the personal surnames, Mao. As a special case, it was an address to the former chairman of the People's Republic of China in an implicit manner; this keyword was considered crucial to Chinese history, culture, and society.

3. The numbers in the brackets indicate the frequency of the cultural keywords in the target corpus.

4. The authors acknowledge that the structure of Chinese sentences of parallelism sometimes can be Chinese coordinative structures in terms of sentence structure. However, the category of hybrid Chinese sentences of parallelism in this study focuses more on sentence semantics.