Dependency Features of English Nouns in China News English

Abstract

Nouns are one of the most frequently used word classes in English. As one variety of "World Englishes", China English has received much concern in recent years. However, most research on nouns is still at the cognitive aspect or in the traditional qualitative way. As a new quantitative method, dependency grammar reveals the internal relations among the words in the sentence. Therefore, the syntactic features of nouns in China News English can provide a new perspective. The raw material of China English in this study is randomly crawled from China Daily, and the News part in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) from 2013 to 2016is selected as the reference corpus. By using the Jupyter Notebook based on Python, the dependency treebanks are generated. After comparing the proportion of the word classes, dependency direction, and dependency distance of different dependents of nouns in China Daily and COCA, this paper finds that 1) On the whole, the categories of dependents in China English and American English are similar. Determiners, adjectives, nouns, prepositions, verbs, numbers, proper nouns, conjunctions, pronouns and particles are the top ten frequently-used modifiers of nouns. Compared with American English, China English tends to use more adjectives and nouns, while the determiners especially the articles and pronouns are relatively less used. 2) Both in China English and American English, the percentage of HI constructions and HF constructions is close to 50%. China English tends to be more right-embedded than American English. Compared with AmE, in ChiE, prepositions, conjunctions and participles are more frequently used as post-modifiers. 3) The mean dependency distance value of China English (2.68) is larger than American English (2.61). Both in China English and American English, the mean dependency distance of pre-modifiers is shorter than in post-modifiers. The longer the mean dependency distance value is, the more difficult is in processing the information. It indicates that in the News domain, China English is more difficult to be processed in expression. This research provides a new perspective to studying English variants and enriches the current research on nouns.