Abstract
This study compares and analyzes Chinese debate and speech from the perspective of registers, which makes itself significant since it fills the gaps in the field. This paper is based on a self-built corpus and refers in Biber’s Multi-dimension/Multi-feature Approach. The quantitative statistical results show that there are 44 significant differences among the 65 linguistic features of debate and speech registers, and that these feature differences, from the macroscopic view, can be summarized into 8 different dimensions, which, to be specific, are known respectively as Multi-directional Interaction VS Single-directional Communication, Demonstrative VS Narrative, Intense Confrontation VS Deliberate Storytelling, Centralized Focuses VS Dispersing Contents, Precise Expressions VS Diverse Methods of Expressions, Informative VS Affective, Specialized VS Universal, along with Literate Style VS Oral Style. Why there are these linguistic features and dimensional differences between the two registers is also explained. It could be fair to say that this study makes a breakthrough on the basis of Biber’s research which mainly put its focus on linguistic features at the lexical, syntactic perspectives. And that is to advance comparing linguistic features between debate and speech registers to perspectives of phonetics and speeds. Yet it has its deficiency for failing to conduct factor analysis in the process of dimension induction due to the limited volume of text corpus.
Highlights
Great achievements in studying debate and speech have been made in China, yet few of them are done from the perspective of register
Biber’s multi-dimension/multi-feature approach would not bring about a biased result in analyzing registers as before when only single or a few linguistic features were focused, and make itself a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, macro- and micro- analysis, which helps to avoid the limitations caused by adopting a single method or analyzing from a single angle
In terms of linguistic features, instead of indiscriminately taking Biber’s in his register studies, we identified 65 linguistic features for investigation on the basis of specific situational characteristics and communicative purposes of Chinese debate and speech, along with reality perception of differences between the two
Summary
Great achievements in studying debate and speech have been made in China, yet few of them are done from the perspective of register. Biber’s multi-dimension/multi-feature approach is to identify several (usually dozens) linguistic features of different registers and have their frequencies compared statistically, which leads to a microscopic comparison among multiple features. International Journal of Language and Linguistics 2018; 6(5): 163-172 differences among linguistic features, analyzing co-occurring factors and calculating dimension scores In this way, Biber’s multi-dimension/multi-feature approach would not bring about a biased result in analyzing registers as before when only single or a few linguistic features were focused, and make itself a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, macro- and micro- analysis, which helps to avoid the limitations caused by adopting a single method or analyzing from a single angle. The results could be used to improve apparent effects of register teaching in education, Chinese-English translation accuracy in translation, as well as operability of computer recognition for registers in information processing It could be assumed as a preliminary for multi-dimension studies. Shi Xiaodong’s Segmentation System for Chinese and SPSS 18.0 were adopted for word segmentation, comparison of means and independent samples t-test
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