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Abstract
The Internet corpora have become a powerful research tool for linguists. This article is intended to explore the diffusion of Chinese catchwords through the Internet. It carries out diachronic- and cross-regional comparative analyses of the diffusion of Shanzhai by employing the Baidu Index, a key word search tool developed by the Chinese search engine Baidu. It was found that: (1) the spread of Shanzhai shows the features of periodicity; (2) the diffusion of Shanzhai demonstrates the feature of radiating from the centres, which is counter-evidence against geographic shifting as proposed by Hashimoto.
Notes
* According to The Modern Chinese Dictionary (6th edn) the meanings of Shanzhai are listed as follows: (1) a defensive fenced stronghold in the dangerous sections of the mountains (2) a walled or fenced mountain village; Robinhoods’ camp, (3) the village in China’s southwestern mountainous area, (4) faked, unconventional, non-genuine (Lv & Ding Citation2012, pp. 1237). The fourth meaning is interpreted as new to Shanzhai. After careful reading, we may find that the fourth meaning is irrelevant to the other three meanings. Therefore, the author uses Shanzhai to represent the fourth meaning, showing it is different from the original meanings of ‘Shanzhai’.
1. The data was adopted from Baidu Index.