Abstract
Chinese online literature has rapidly gained popularity, displaying characteristics that differ from traditional literature, and has now become an important and unique literary genre. Chinese readers of online literature account for nearly half of the total number of Chinese internet users, approximately 537 million. This study aims to explore the linguistic characteristics of online literature through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The study builds a large-scale corpus from the largest Chinese online literature website Qidian, focusing on six quantitative linguistic indicators: word frequency, lexical richness, lexical density, word vectors, punctuation distribution, and average paragraph length. Additionally, three text mining indicators—thematic concentration, information entropy, and authorial perspective—are introduced. The findings reveal that online literature features a casual and informal language style, characterized by a high frequency of function words, shorter average paragraph lengths, and significant reliance on dialogue. Furthermore, the thematic concentration is generally low, which is related to the verbosity of online works and their emphasis on narrative flow rather than detailed descriptions. Overall, this paper provides empirical data to enhance the understanding of the linguistic features of online literature and suggesting that future research could adopt broader metrics and more comprehensive text mining techniques.
Published Version
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