A Study On Morphology And Syntax Of China English In News Reports

Will China English stand alongside British, American or othervarieties of English in the family of world Englishes? The answer is “yes”.As one part of World Englishes, China English deserves much research,especially on its morphology and syntax. The previous research on ChinaEnglish mainly involves two aspects, one on the spoken or writtendiscourse of Chinese English learners, and the other on theEnglish-language media of China. English media in China mirror Chineseculture and thinking pattern thus are the representative of China English.China English in news reports is of great significance and hasattracted a lot of researchers, most of whom focus on theEnglish-language news reports in Chinese English media rather than inforeign English media. The present study thus conducts a comparativeresearch on China English from its morphological and syntactical levels.Based on the theory of language variety, the study selects articlesfrom Chinese media China Daily and Global Times as well as foreignmainstream media The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Time andtakes them as the corpus to conduct the comparative research, hoping toshed new light on the research of China English.On morphological level, China English terms are mainly dividedinto three categories, Chinese cultural-specific words, Chineseneologisms and Chinese political and economical terms, whether indomestic or foreign media. Their forms vary from pinyin spelling, pinyinplus explanation, literal translation, literal translation plus explanation to free translation. However, Chinese media tend to express China Englishterms by pinyin spelling while inflexions of the terms can only be foundin foreign media. In addition, foreign news media are more likely to usebrackets, italics and quotation marks.On syntactical level,60articles (half from Chinese media and halffrom foreign media) are chosen randomly from the electronic versions ofthe above newspapers. A comparative study is conducted based on theabove corpus and the author analyzes the syntactical characteristicsbetween China English variety and Normative English variety in terms oflengths of sentence, types of sentence and passive voice.The present study contributes to the comparative research of ChinaEnglish and Normative English and describes the characteristics of ChinaEnglish from morphological and syntactical levels. Furthermore, itdeepens our understanding of China English.