A Corpus-based Diachronic Analysis Of Housing Price In China News Report

Housing price has undergone ups and downs since the macro-controls of housing price in2004. Anincreasing number of news reports on housing price express their predictions of the price tendency as wellas the controlling effects. The author tries to make a diachronic analysis of housing price report in terms oflanguage features from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Based on the two self-constructed housingcorpora, one consists of English news report on housing price from2001to2003, and the other consists ofthose from September2011to June2012. Compared with BNC news corpus, the language features areanalyzed and compared in terms of lexicon, keywords, collocation, modal verbs and quotation.Research findings show that both the two housing corpora centered on the parties involved and thevariables influencing housing price. However, the2012corpus (HPC2) prefers the American spelling toBritish one, which suggests that news language is becoming standard and unified. In the meantime, thekeyword analysis finds that home, property and cities rank top in keyness. As house is one of four basicnecessities for the Chinese in traditional culture, home and property co-occur frequently with price,indicating the affective factors and lawful rights to have a house of one’s own. The popularity of “first-tiercities” or “second-tier cities” suggests that the housing issue has been the issue of high concern nationwide,but it varies from city to city. Before the government intervention, housing price is reported to keep soaringwith focus on the underlying causes and depressingly negative consequences; yet now the semanticpreference and prosody become neutral and complex, and its prospect is still vague and uncertain.Besides, the housing price shows dynamic and complicated changes under a series of governmentcontrols. The parities involved in the description of housing price differ from each other. However, a largerproportion of voices come from government officials and experts, who emphasize on the determination ofcontinuous controls and the uncertainty of future price respectively. Compared with the housing situationbefore2004, housing price changes from the dominant growing trend to a mixed uncertainty, suggesting thepossibly invisible effects of price controls.In conclusion, by comparing the characteristics of lexicon, keywords, collocation, modal verbs and quotation, it can be seen that housing price has gone tremendous changes over the past eight years under aseries of government controls. As language mirrors the society, so the language differences suggest thetremendous changes of housing market in present society. It becomes more complicated and varied in termsof tendency, influential factors, public affection and semantic preference, which indicates that the housingmarket is still unpredictable.