A Corpus-based Comparative Study of the Linguistic Features in Chinese and Foreign Scientists’ Biographies

Abstract

Biography of scientists is a literary and academic text with important value. It is not only an important carrier of carrying scientific spirit and spreading scientific culture, but also contains profound academic research significance. Its text expression and narrative core will be deeply influenced by different regional cultural backgrounds. This study takes corpus linguistics as the research method, focusing on the comparative analysis of the differences in linguistic features between Chinese and foreign scientists’ biographies. By constructing a comparative corpus of Chinese and foreign scientists’ biographies, the study systematically extracts high-frequency words and word collocations in the text for statistical analysis. The research results show that the high-frequency core vocabulary of domestic scientists’ biographies mainly includes “国家”, “团队”, “技术” and so on. The collocation of related words mostly focuses on collective cooperation, practical application and national development needs. The overall text highlights a strong collectivism culture. In contrast, most of the biographies of foreign scientists focus on words such as “theory”, “discovery”, “published”, etc. The lexical collocation focuses on personal scientific research exploration, theoretical innovation and dissemination of academic achievements, which is highly consistent with the cultural tradition of individualism in the field of western scientific research. This study not only clarifies the cultural value differences behind the linguistic features of Chinese and foreign biographies, but also provides a quantifiable empirical reference for cross-cultural text analysis and the creation and translation of scientists’ biographies.