ABSTRACT
Practical implications of the present study, includes the computational processing of Chinese, the teaching and learning of Chinese. Greater awareness of stylistic variation will also contribute to the advance of Natural Language Processing (NLP) of Chinese, at various levels of operation. The lack of understanding of the pervasive stylistic variation within written Chinese has been one of the obstacles to achieving superior proficiency in the language. The present research has a number of potential pedagogical benefits, both at the conceptual level and at the level of practical decisions. The empirical findings from the present work will help strengthen awareness to stylistic variation, even for teachers and heritage learners, may also be woefully inadequate in this area. Visualization of stylistic differences on stylistic 'maps' made possible by Correspondence Analysis can be used to sharpen stylistic awareness. The cross-linguistic comparison with English carried out in the present project may also help to learners with an English language background.
