Linguistic Variation and Standardization of English as a Global Lingua Franca in a Multicultural Context

Abstract

Under the multicultural context, there is always the phenomenon that languages use multiple forms to express the same or similar meanings, among which there are even some usages that deviate from the traditional linguistic norms, and this phenomenon of covariation is the basis and prerequisite of ephemeral change. This paper mainly adopts the research methods of the Modern Chinese Corpus and the AmE Brown Family Corpora Corpus, and explores the features of language variation and standardization based on dependent syntactic analysis in a multicultural context. The intrinsic motivation of language variation and the constraint mechanism of variation are explored, the intrinsic law of language variation is discovered, and the cognitive sociolinguistic model of language variation is revealed. It is found that the process of language variation can be described by an S-shaped curve, with variation starting very slowly and increasing faster after it has increased to a certain level (around 20%). After the proportion of new forms reaches about 80%, the growth rate slows down significantly until it reaches the norm.