Abstract
Exploring the meaning of language is essential to understanding the world. Teubert
asserts that “corpus linguistics aims to analyze the meaning of words within texts, or
rather, within their individual context” (140). Words, according to Biber, Conrad and
Reppen (1998), are not lexicon or dictionary entries, but text segments whose elements
exhibit an inherent semantic cohesion which can be made visible through quantitative
analysis of discourse or corpora. This research aims to discuss the meaning of the text
segment international community in two different discourse communities: British and
Chinese, which represent two typical discourse communities in Western and Asian
countries respectively. Looking at the different collocations and grammatical structures
within which international community occurs provides a corpus-based analysis. The
GuCorpus constitutes articles from The Guardian newspaper and the PdCorpus is made
up of articles from the People’s Daily newspaper in China. These corpora have been
compiled to serve the aforementioned research purposes. Through a comparative
analysis, this article aims to explore the different ways in which the lexical item
international community is used, and how the term‟s different meanings are constructed and
understood. The analysis will “reveal and clarify how underlying ideologies are inscribed
in and mediated through the linguistic system” (Caldas-Coulthard x).