A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of English and Chinese: An Exploratory Study

摘要

This paper investigates English and Chinese corpora consisting of literary texts. It shows that an exhaustive corpus-based approach is the most effective analytical method for comparing texts across two different languages. Type/token ratio, lexical density, average sentence length are chosen as parameters for contrastive analysis. These linguistic features, which are extracted by a corpus-based method, enable us to take a new step in evaluating the characteristics and language patterns of use in a specific discourse and text style in different languages.