Lexical Features of Economic Legal Policy and News in China Since the COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

Lexical features are influenced by different languages and genres. The study of lexical features in different genres of texts on the same topic is helpful to understand the universalities and peculiarities of languages. This study constructs a research on the lexical feature and word collocations of two self-build corpora (China's economic Legal Policy Corpus and English News Corpus during the COVID-19 pandemic), the methods of Quantitative Linguistics and context interpretation are adopted. It was found that: (1) the word length, word frequency, word cluster and high frequency word distribution in English economic news and Chinese economic legal policies are influenced by language and genre to some extent, and they conform to different functional image distribution; (2) during the COVID-19 pandemic, “development” has been the focus of China's economic legal policies and English news, the two have attached importance to economic recovery and taken a positive attitude toward it in different ways. These findings suggest that: (1) There are some universalities and peculiarities between English economic news and Chinese economic legal policies in the distribution of lexical feature; (2) there is a certain synchronization between laws and news, and both of them maintain a positive and objective attitude toward the economic development during the pandemic. This study carries out a macroscopic investigation on internal structure and external interpretation, which enriches the study on lexical features and cultural features of language and provides some references for relevant studies.