ABSTRACT
This chapter presents evidence for a two-dimensional analysis of stylistic variation in modern written Chinese. Contrary to the tacitly assumed dichotomous distinction between spoken versus written styles, there should instead be two separate dimensions; in addition to a secondary literary dimension characterized by literary/alternative form, there is a stronger yet underappreciated primary dimension of literateness. The findings confirm some of our intuition, such as the association between classical Chinese elements and the written style, the classical elements tending to be somewhat literate in addition to being literary. The two dimensions are generated by applying the statistical procedure of Correspondence Analysis to a large set of linguistic features from a number of corpora. The chapter discusses the two dimensions in turn, based on a number of corpora, including LCMC, UCLA, ZCTC, BCC, CCL and MCFD. LCMC will be used first and the other corpora will then be used to for replication.
