Colloquialism and genre variation in Chinese

Abstract Colloquialization has been identified as one of the most crucial change processes of the English language, through which written genres gradually shift towards spoken styles. Colloquialism refers to the synchronous features resulting from colloquialization. There is limited research into the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese or how Chinese colloquialism manifests in different spoken and written genres. To extract the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese, this study used a corpus-driven approach to determine and compare keywords and phrase frames from two training Chinese corpora and those keywords and phrase frames with higher frequencies were retained for further testing.