A Research on the Language Attitude and Language Usage of Undergraduates by Applying Corpus-based Computational Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

In order to study the interactive relationship between the society and the language thorough case study, this paper investigated the language attitude and language usage of 150 undergraduates from Hong Kong and Macao who now study in the universities of Guangzhou. By applying the Matched-guise technique, questionnaire survey, concealing interviews and oral interviews from Sociolinguistics, the results show that the subjects' emotional and functional evaluation on the Mandarin is lower than the the Cantonese. And the subjects' status evaluation on the Mandarin is higher than the Cantonese. The gender of the speakers will affect the subjects' evaluation on the Mandarin and Cantonese to some extent. In additon, the subjects' self-evaluation on Mandarin level is low while their self-expeciton on Mandarin level is high. The paper also tried to set up a small but dynamic corpus which includes the personal information of subjects, conversations and also the taggings of the errors in pronunciation, lexis and syntax. The experimental technique from sociolinguistics and the corpus set up by applying computational linguistics can clearly and effectively reflect the language attitude and language usage of the specific subjects investigated. And the investigation results also contribute to realize the subjcets' self-belonging and self-identification to our motherland by using both of the linguistic theories and the scientific computing applications.