A Study Of China English Words On COCA From The Perspective Of Discourse And Power

Language is spiritual home to our human beings. It is the most remarkablefeatures superior to other animals for it is culturally-loaded. English is one of the mostwidely used languages in the world and there are a great number of English-speakingareas such as European Union, America, and other international institutions and so on.Our China is one of them that our national gate has been open and English has beenspread after the Opium War. Nowadays, the contact between China andEnglish-speaking countries, especially America, is closer than ever before, includingtrade, religion, art, food, education, and politics. Under the process of mutualcommunication, learning English has been surged in recent twenty years in China.National examination, professionally-advanced test and higher education qualificationcan’t be gained without access to English tests. A great many of culturally-loadedEnglish vocabularies appear, and thus China English is formed. Since that, a lot ofscholars start to pay more attention to China English. In spite of different viewpointson China English, most of them focus their research on China English definition,existence and evaluation in macroscopic eyes. However, China English should beclosely related with specific context and its developing situations. This paper attemptsto discuss the heated issues of China English vocabularies on Corpus ofContemporary American English (COCA) and show its current situations in America.In contemporary era, competitions among countries are not military power butcultural soft power. At present, soft power can not be ignored by any country in theworld and it is a necessary factor for governmental leaders to enact national strategies.At the key transitional stage of China, soft power is more urgent in improvingpeople’s living standards and in solving employment problems. As part of soft power,cultural strength research seems so indispensible. This paper attempts to find outcultural soft power hidden in China English vocabularies on the Corpus ofContemporary American English and to discuss them from the perspective ofdiscourse and power.In this paper, the author collected480vocabularies from123articles related withChina English, which are widely accepted by scholars at home, and then classified and calculated267vocabularies and their frequencies with quantitative methods onthe corpus and analyzed some of them further with the aid of software MicrosoftExcel2003and AntConc3.2.1. The results revealed that China English vocabulariesconcerning culture possess the largest number of frequencies among8kinds ofvocabularies, including Chinese culture, nature, politics, economy, education, science,entertainment and others. The results also revealed that current situations of ChinaEnglish vocabularies on the COCA are not so positive and thus our discourse powerthrough expression of the corpus needs further improvements. The author of thisthesis also proposes some suggestions on improving our discourse power at theinternational stage and implications for senior high English teachers on how to bringChina English vocabularies into the classroom in order to cultivate students’ culturalsoft power awareness.