Abstract
This paper uses Wmatrix to generate semantic tagging to compare corpora of media representations between the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. The USAS tagger is used to assign the semantic field tags to the America Dream Corpus (ADC) and the Chinese Dream Corpus (CDC). The motivation of this study is to replicate the studies using an automated and inclusive method based on semantic tagging (Potts, A. & P. Baker. 2012. Does semantic tagging identify cultural change in British and American English? International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(3). 295–324), and more importantly, to conduct a broad semantic categorization on both national dreams so as to uncover the cultural, social and historical similarities and/or differences. It is found that the cultural difference of the individualistic home and work association of the American Dream versus the collectivistic nation and world attributions of the Chinese Dream. The different historical stage and social-economic contexts are disclosed from the different temporal positions from time category, and the contrastive tags associated with negative representation of the American Dream and positive representation of the Chinese Dream.
Funding statement: The work described in this paper was substantially supported by Guangdong Province High-level University Foundation, granted from Jinan University at Shenzhen, China (grant number:88018052).
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