Preliminary Studies on Register Function of Chinese Function Words

This paper explores the effectiveness of Chinese function words in register studies based on text mining and attempts to determine their register specific functions based on quantitative methods. Following the hypothesis that function words can be used as features to differentiate different registers, our text clustering experiment demonstrates that different registers in Chinese can in fact be classified in terms of distribution of function words. Our correspondence analysis shows that the correlations between function words and different registers vary, hence some function words have register-specific functions. In addition, the correlation coefficients between function words and various registers can determine the register-specific function of function words. Our quantitative model of register specific function of function words makes an important contribution to our understanding of the correlation between function words and registers.