Lexical variations in Asian Chinese speaking communities: a corpus-informed study of online, offline, and digital

Abstract Studies on Chinese lexical variations, an emerging field in research of Global Chinese, remain scarce. Drawing upon the notion of onomasiological variation, this study employs corpus linguistics to examine semantic and grammatical characteristics of Chinese variations of three timely lexicons, including online, offline, and digital in the Greater China Region like the mainland of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and overseas countries including Singapore and Malaysia. The results revealed Chinese variation patterns across regions and indicate two tendencies. First, the variations of a lexicon are identical to one another when the selected Chinese speaking communities tend to use different Chinese variations. Second, the variations are likely to be semantically variant when the communities have the same tendency in using the variations. This study argues that corpus linguistics is applicable and appropriate in the research of Chinese lexical variations, as it allows both quantitative and qualitative analysis.