A Study On The Information Function Of Lettered-words In Chinese Technical Reports

After China’s opening and reform, a large number of lettered-words are introducedinto Chinese and become more and more popular as a result of the economic globalizationwhich requires much more frequent exchanges among different nations, andlettered-words play an increasingly important role in Chinese people’s daily life, academicstudies and scientific exchanges. Lettered-word flourishes in Chinese language system dueto its concise, distinctive, novel features. In all kinds of spoken and written expressions,lettered-words are widely used by Chinese people. Lettered-word becomes a heated issueafter the regulations published by Ministry of Education of China in2001, Law of thePeople’s Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language. Thus,against the backdrop of information era, this paper focuses on the lettered-words whichoccur in scientific reports with an aim to discover the information functions oflettered-words. This paper builds a corpus on the basis of all lettered-words fromSeptember to November in2012in Science and Technology Daily, and detailed calculationand analysis are conducted after collecting data. As a result of continuous analyzing andconcluding, this paper summarizes nine major information functions of lettered-words:information prominence function, information economy function, information contrastfunction, head reminding function, information visualization function, informationlocating function, information condensing function, information questing function,information marking function, Since the paper does both qualitative and quantitativeanalysis on every information function, information economy function is discovered to bethe most important information function according to the fact that it occupies the largestproportion among the total nine information functions. The results of this research reveal afact that lettered-words indeed are beneficial to the information transmission andespecially in the situation that Chinese words are too laborious to convey information inan efficient and accurate manner.