Sketching a Chinese writer’s vocabulary profile in English: the case of Ha Jin

Sketching a Chinese writer’s vocabulary profile in English: the case of Ha Jin Vincent X. Wang Department of English University of Macau vxwang@umac.mo Abstract This study sketches a vocabulary profile of Ha Jin, a prominent Chinese writer. Ha Jin’s writ- ings have been repeatedly used to showcase a Chinese variety of English, and his repertoire of words deserves systematic description on its own right. A sample of his novels is con- structed for this research, and is compared with novels written by (a) native English speakers and (b) creative writing by advanced Chinese- speaking learners of English. Corpus-based analysis reveals that Ha Jin’s vocabulary reper- toire is as extensive and diversified as those of native speaker novelists, while markedly richer than those of advanced learners. 1 Introduction Of the native speakers of Chinese who wrote and published in the English literary world, Ha Jin is one of the most acclaimed novelists. Ha Jin has received numerous important writing awards in the English world (cf. 2.1). He is probably also the most studied Chinese-English bilingual in the World Englises lit- erature (WE). Numerous WE scholars have empha- sised the importance of recognising a Chinese variety of English, given the fact that a staggering 440-650 million Chinese are learning English as an L2 (cf. He & Zhang, 2010; Xu & Sharifian, 2017) and China is now a global economic power. An ex- tensive debate has developed on whether a Chinese variety of English can be identified (e.g., Li, 2007; Luke & Richards, 1982; Wang, 2008; Xu, 2010a). Many researchers believe that a Chinese variety of English is now emerging (e.g., Kirkpatrick, 2007; Xu, 2010a, 2010b; You, 2011). This debate aside, few researchers would deny the importance of sys- tematically describing the linguistic characteristics of proficient Chinese-English bilingual speakers. We carry out a corpus-based description of Ha Jin’s vocabulary profile in comparison with those of native speaker novelists and advanced Chinese EFL learners, with the aim of answering the following questions: (a) Is Ha Jin’s vocabulary repertoire as rich as those of native speaker novelists in terms of type and diversity? (b) How much more closely does Ha Jin ap- proximate native speakers’ vocabulary pro- files than advanced Chinese EFL learners do? 2 Literature survey In this section, we review research on Ha Jin and survey most relevant corpus-based studies for lan- guage teaching and learning. 2.1 Ha Jin and bilingual creativity Bilingual creativity has become an important area of World Englishes research (Bolton, 2010; Kachru, 1994; You, 2011), and Ha Jin’s novels have been investigated as exemplifying a Chinese variety of English. Zhang (2002) follows Kachru’s (1994) treatment of bilingual creativity to examine Ha Jin’s In the Pond (2000b). A range of “nativised” charac- teristics – such as address terms, curse words, proper names, vocabulary items of Chinese refer- ence, political discourse, metaphors and idioms – were detected. In the same strand of research, Xu PACLIC 32 722 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 …

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