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The American Dream meets the Chinese Dream: a corpus-driven phraseological analysis of news texts

  • Zhide Hou

    Zhide Hou received his doctorate in applied linguistics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and is currently lecturer at Shenzhen Tourism College of Jinan University. His research interests include corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to investigate media representations of newsworthy topics or concepts.

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Published/Copyright: May 1, 2018

Abstract

This study is a corpus-driven examination of frequent lexical words and keywords in the news texts related to the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. Based on Sinclair’s (Sinclair, John McHardy. 2004. Trust the Text. Routledge: London) five categories of co-selection as framework, it discusses the patterns of co-selection across the corpora of news texts, with a particular focus on the cumulative effects of the co-construction of situated meanings and establishment of ideological positions associated with the two dreams. The corpus linguistic tool Wordsmith is used to generate frequent words and keywords for detailed concordance analysis along both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in order to indicate collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and semantic prosody. The findings demonstrate the individualistic home, work and education associations of the American Dream versus the collectivistic attributions of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. The study not only confirms different cultural practices, but also reveals different social-historical conditions, and political influences associated with media representations of the American Dream and the Chinese Dream.

Funding statement: The work described in this paper was substantially supported by Guangdong Province High-level University Foundation, granted from Jinan University at Shenzhen, China (Grant Number:56600106).

About the author

Zhide Hou

Zhide Hou received his doctorate in applied linguistics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and is currently lecturer at Shenzhen Tourism College of Jinan University. His research interests include corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to investigate media representations of newsworthy topics or concepts.

Acknowledgments

The very helpful feedback from the editor-in-chief Professor Srikant Sarangi and the anonymous reviewers is gratefully acknowledged.

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Published Online: 2018-5-1
Published in Print: 2018-4-25

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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