On the Intergenerational Inheritance of Thai Chinese Literary Language Based on Style Calculation

Overseas Chinese literature, as a cultural product reflecting the formation, evolution, and variation of inheritance languages, provides an important research perspective and text source for exploring the intergenerational inheritance of Overseas Chinese language. This study selected representative works of Thai Chinese writers born between the 1920s and 1940s and uses corpus technology and computational stylistic methods to comprehensively examine the intergenerational characteristics from the perspective of language inheritance, including lexical, sentence, and discourse levels. The research results indicate that there are intergenerational differences between younger and older generation of Thai Chinese writers in their use of inheritance language styles, mainly concentrated at the lexical level. The average word length of the works of the older generation of writers is relatively short, mainly due to the use of more archaic words, especially monosyllabic prepositions with ancient connotations in their parts of speech. In addition, they tend to use cultural vocabulary such as idioms, colloquialism, dialects, literary allusions, and ancient poetry, which confirms the conservatism of Thai Chinese as a traditional language and indirectly reflects the differences in Chinese proficiency between two generations writers in the special historical context.