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A lexical exploration of Chinese cyber pidgin
Author
Yang, Lurong
Supervisor
Lambert, Richard James
Abstract
Chinese Cyber Pidgin (or CCP, for short) is a linguistic phenomenon that has recently become extremely popular in China, especially on television and various social media platforms. It blends Chinese with elements of other languages, especially English, but occasionally Japanese and Korean. CCP creates many novel lexical items through a variety of word- formation strategies. Though previous studies have attempted typologies of the word-formation strategies in CCP, the categorisations have tended to be oversimplified, and their applications are not explored over different electronic communication avenues (modes).
In order to generate a systematic categorisation of CCP and examine the distributional differences across the different modes, in this study, I collected data from five separate modes related to a popular online Internet show U Can U Bibi, namely, subtitles and ‘stickers’ from the video on iQiyi (the show’s official video site), ‘bullet curtain’ comments on Bilibili.com (a video sharing website), posts on Sina Weibo (the largest microblog website in China, similar to Twitter) and comments on Douban (a Chinese movie/television rating website, similar to IMDb).
The dataset is composed of 414,257 words within which 1,200 items of Chinese Cyber Pidgin occur. The word-formation strategies are categorised based on phonetic, semantic, and morphological features. The occurrence of these word-formation strategies is then calculated across the five modes. The multi-mode theme-based dataset explores a greater range of CCP communication modes than previous literature and enables a more in-depth and comprehensive overview of how different word-formation strategies are used and distributed.
In order to generate a systematic categorisation of CCP and examine the distributional differences across the different modes, in this study, I collected data from five separate modes related to a popular online Internet show U Can U Bibi, namely, subtitles and ‘stickers’ from the video on iQiyi (the show’s official video site), ‘bullet curtain’ comments on Bilibili.com (a video sharing website), posts on Sina Weibo (the largest microblog website in China, similar to Twitter) and comments on Douban (a Chinese movie/television rating website, similar to IMDb).
The dataset is composed of 414,257 words within which 1,200 items of Chinese Cyber Pidgin occur. The word-formation strategies are categorised based on phonetic, semantic, and morphological features. The occurrence of these word-formation strategies is then calculated across the five modes. The multi-mode theme-based dataset explores a greater range of CCP communication modes than previous literature and enables a more in-depth and comprehensive overview of how different word-formation strategies are used and distributed.
Date Issued
2018
Call Number
P120.I6 Yan