Linguistic corpus and sociolinguistic study
语料库与社会语言学研究
Jinzhi Su 金智 苏

Abstract 摘要
Methodology of sociolinguistics is different from traditional structural linguistics, in particular, from the Chomskyan transformational generative grammar. Sociolinguistic distinctive methodological feature is to analyze language elements in the speech communities in qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the early studies, sociolinguists paid much more attention on spoken forms because these forms could be analyzed in the speech communities and be explained from the relationship between language variables and sociolinguistic variables such as ethnic group, age, social class and gender easily. On the contrary, the study of written forms got inattention because they could not be done as well as the spoken forms due to the use of traditional method to collect data from the literatures. Corpus and corpus approach has had a great help to the study of written language since it emerged. Sociolinguistic studies reap the benefits from corpus approach such as in the study of gender language, the study of words from Chinese speech communities using the LIVAC, the study of Chinese register, and discourse analysis. These studies are pilot ones and this line of study has accumulated experiences for the future study but is still limited and there is clearly need for further investigation. The result of loanwords studies by Su (2010) shows that 134 Chinese phonetic matching loanwords, one percent among the total loanwords in The Dictionary of Chinese Loanwords (1984), have been replaced by the Chinese indigenous words, but this finding was not testified by the contemporary Chinese corpus. The result of the reexamination of the changing histories of 134 Chinese phonetic matching loanwords by using the Contemporary Chinese Corpus established by State Language Committee of PRC supports Su’s finding and reinforces the function of corpus approach for analyzing the trends of language change. Finally some suggestions are made for the improvement of sociolinguistic study by using Chinese corpus.

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