A corpus-based study on Chinese modification patterns of nouns across registers

Nominal modification works to describe and restrict noun phrases, making the information delivery more vivid and precise. In English, the communicative functions of different modification patterns of head-nouns have been studied in a lot of corpus-based investigations of the written and the spoken registers, but few corpus-based register studies have been ever conducted in Chinese. This research takes the initiative attempt to conduct a corpus-based study on Chinese modification patterns across registers. A one-million-word corpus including both written and spoken Chinese is first built and all the modification patterns of noun phrases are extracted in Chunker, a self-developed colligation query and analysis tool. Through classification of modification patterns and statistical processing, the study displays the distributions of simple and complex modification patterns and the relationship between the frequency of modification patterns and the information density across registers and discusses the functional implication of such distributions and relationship under the guidance of Biber’s register theory.