Is China English Transforming into Nativization Stage? A Case Study of ‘modifying-modified’ Sequencing in China English

Abstract

As China English is gradually identified as a variety of world Englishes rather than an inauthentic deviant from the standard English, a number of research has focused on discussing the existence and codification of China English. Most of the studies concluded that China English is undergoing nativization process in mainland China. However, the previous studies mainly discussed the lexical features in China English. The study aims to discuss the extent to which the codified syntactic feature in China English is used and accepted. Therefore, the present study adopted a corpus-based approach to analyze the use of a codified syntactic feature, ‘modifying-modified’ sequence in China English. Over 1,685 sentences in two corpus were identified and compared. The result shows that despite the fact that the codified syntactic feature has been localized in Chinese context, it is not widely accepted as an appropriate variable, which may indicate that China English has not reached the nativization stage.