A corpus-based study of “Europeanization” in Chinese academic writing

Abstract

“Europeanization” in Modern Chinese has long been discussed. During the May Forth Period, many “Europeanized” features were absorbed into Chinese to create the new national language. However, after years of development and language contact with English, some previously observed features encountered changes and evolutions. In earlier studies, research on “Europeanization” in Chinese was greatly restricted to literary texts. Concerning this, this study aims to investigate the presence of “Europeanization” in Chinese academic writing at the current time. The data in this study are extracted from a self-built corpus of master’s students’ dissertations during 2019-2022. During the analysis, four major “Europeanized” features are examined, and two types of comparisons are made on their degree of “Europeanization”. The first type is to explore the disciplinary distinctions presented in science, engineering, economics, and art texts among the master’s dissertations. And the other type is to compare features in academic writing represented by the master’s dissertations with other writing genres such as literature, news, and online posts. Regarding the four features analyzed using the self-built corpus, this study finds that “Europeanized” 被beì has displayed genre-specific characteristics in the context of academic writing. Compared to written Chinese in news and online posts, 被beì constructions in students’ dissertations express a neutral semantic meaning more frequently and are adopted more often in short passive structures. Besides, the corpus data also verify an increased and expanded use of coordinators like和hé. Furthermore, both 被beì and 和hé in academic writing are found to display disciplinary distinctions. As for “Europeanized” 的de and “Europeanized” 是shì, their usages are not significantly presented in academic writings by students, even though they prominently appear in other genres of writing.