A Corpus-based Diachronic Study On The Language Changes Of China Daily

Social changes give rise to the changes in language, while the diachronic study of language also reflects the changes of society. Newspaper, as a widely used medium, is a mirror of the society. It records the events taking place in the society in the most direct, convenient and authentic way. Thus, the status and the functions of newspapers determine that the language of newspaper can most demonstrate the authentic use of language in society.With the advancement of reform and opening up policy in China, Chinese government has prompted the degree of opening in China and reinforced the international communication with other countries. China Daily, as the most influential medium in English, serves as a window for western countries to get acquainted with China. Based on corpus construction principles, the self-established corpus consisting of front page articles of China Daily at the interval of 5 years is processed with analytical tools to answer the following questions:(1) Are there any changes in the language of China Daily during the 25 years? If there are, what are they?(2) What might be the causes of these changes in the newspaper?With the research in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, this diachronic study displays the usage of language in different periods, reveals how language changes through the aspects of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and stylistic analysis. Findings are described, analyzed to show that language changes reflect the development in China effectively. The data provide evidence for further study on causes of language evolutions and offer materials for forming standard expressions. It is hoped that the corpus-based diachronic study would help the learners in mastering the usage of vocabulary and sentence patterns more accurately and appropriately.