A study of the lexical and syntactic aspects of the language of personal web pages in Hong Kong

Abstract

Along with its global scale and intensity of use, the Internet is having an effect on language in general, and on individual languages in particular. Consequently it becomes a hot topic to explore the ways how languages are influenced in 5 internet-using situations, namely Emails, Synchronous Chatgroups, Asynchronous Chatgroups, Virtual Worlds and World Wide Web. The language on Personal web pages (a kind of World Wide Web), which represents its author’s natural writing competence and language awareness, has brought about unprecedented linguistic properties associated with, but also partially diversified from, previously acceptable expectation and practice of spoken and written language. This thesis is based on a 1,000,011- character corpus of Personal Web page texts selected from Hong Kong websites which provide Internet space for building Personal Web pages. This corpus, hereafter referred to as “Web Corpus”, consists of two sets: the “Diary Set” and the “Composition Set”, representing 500,000 and 500,011 characters respectively. The texts in this “Web Corpus” are composed in Chinese (including Cantonese) and English. The textual features of the language of Personal web pages in Hong Kong were explored by extracting the frequency list of Cantonese dialectal words and English words that appeared throughout the two sets. It was noted that code mixing plays a more prominent role in the “Diary Set” than in the “Composition Set”; what is more, language in the “Diary Set” is closer to spoken language, while language in the “Composition Set” is closer to written language when the distribution of Cantonese dialectal words and English words in accordance with word classes and person pronoun usage across the “Diary Set” and the “Composition Set” is concerned. The finding also presents that there is positive correlation between 9 sociolinguistic factors represented in authors’ replies to questionnaires and their writing competence and language awareness. It shows that the authors who marked Cantonese dialectal words or English words with quotation marks were more aware of using non-standard Chinese words than those who did not do so, thus showing a lower average per person occurrence frequency of Cantonese dialectal words and English words in their writing. This can shed new light on language teaching, especially on how to promote language awareness in order to elevate language competence.

Date of Award	16 Jul 2007
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Pui Kwong WONG (Supervisor)