A Study Of Malaysia Chinese Characteristic Words Based On Written Corpus

At present, one of the main tasks of the Chinese research is to study the features of the regional Chinese, compared with the modern standard Chinese, the regional Chinese has an obvious feature that it has a lot of characteristic words. Based on the Malaysian Chinese news corpus, this paper first re-examine some of Malaysian Chinese characteristic words which have been studied by the predecessors, the re-examination mainly examine word’s meaning、source、use range and collection situation in the New Century Global Chinese Dictionary. Then examine some characteristic words which have been neglected by the predecessors, the examination mainly about the word’s meaning. Next, analyze the basic characteristic of 296 words, including parts of speech, word length and so on. In the aspect of parts of speech, proportion of nouns is the highest, most of these nouns reflect Malaysian politics, education, food and clothing culture, etc. In the aspect of word length, proportion of two-character words is the largest, this indicates that the differences mainly concentrate on the disyllabic words. After classifying these words, summarized four characteristics. First, it clearly reflects the things and phenomenon with Malaysian characteristic. Second, it is largely affected by Guangdong Dialect and South Fujian dialect. Third, it is largely affected by English and Malay. Fourth, it retains some ancient Chinese words or old words. And then analyze the reason why it has these features. Finally, about the word’s coordination problems between Mandarin and Malaysian Chinese, we advise it should be put modern Chinese Mandarin as the main body of the global Chinese, based on this advice, we put forward four coordinated principles and five coordinated ways, and give some suggestions on how to deal with these characteristic words in Malaysian Chinese language teaching.