WORLD CHINESES BASED ON COMPARABLE CORPUS : The Case of Grammatical Variations of jinxing

The term World Chineses (全球華語), though not as common as World Englishes, is becoming more and more widely used with the increasing popularity of Chinese as a second language and with the Chinese diaspora spreading and growing. The lexical variations among World Chineses are easily observed and often studied. Yet, to better understand the dynamicity of World Chineses and facilitate efficient communication among speakers of World Chineses, we need to study grammatical variations in the different varieties of Chinese. In this study, we propose a comparable-corpus-based approach for grammatical comparison. With the case study of the construction of the light verb 進行 jinxing ‘proceed’ in Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, we demonstrate that our approach makes it possible a systematic and comprehensive study of grammatical variations of World Chineses.