A Corpus-Based Study of Syntactic Patterns of Nominalizations Across Chinese and British Media English

In the context of world Englishes, China English has received much scholarly attention over the past three decades. Studies of China English so far have been confined mainly to theoretical issues such as its definition, differentiation, and
historical development. Although the linguistic features of China English have been explored in various studies, corpus-based studies of China English are few and far between. This paper reports on a corpus-based study of the syntactic patterns of nominalizations across China English and British English in two comparable Media English corpora, namely, the Chinese Media English Corpus and the British Media English Corpus. It has been found that Chinese and British Media English differ markedly in the syntactic patterns of nominalizations. Results indicate that there are many more complex nominalizations in Chinese Media English but simple nominalizations are more common in British Media English. Furthermore, Chinese Media English has more uses of premodified nominalizations and phrasal postmodified nominalizations, developing a reliance on compressed and phrasal types of modification, whilst British Media English tends to use more postmodified nominalizations and develops a reliance on expanded and clausal types of modification.