A corpus-based approach to Chinese English lexis

The study approaches the currency of Chinese English lexis from two perspectives. First, it creates a linguistic profile of 408 high-frequency Chinese English terms extracted from the Chinese English Dictionary (CED) corpus by conducting a systematic coding and a statistical calculation of their linguistic features and by comparing the quantitative results with numerical distributions in the extant literature. Second, it evaluates the currency of 3484 Chinese English words in CED against six established corpora of world Englishes in GloWbE and ICE by calculating their frequency statistics in these six corpora and re-evaluates the suitability of GloWbE and ICE for lexical variation by comparing the quantitatively different results generated by the two corpora. Findings of the study cast light on the tendencies of the linguistic behavior of the well-assimilated Chinese English items and on the nature and feature of the variety data in GloWbE and ICE in the world Englishes scenario.