AbstractThe 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.
['Jianhua Zhang']
Internet Corpora-based Diachronic Research on the Diffusion of Shanzhai through the Internet