“Simplicity as a Weapon”: A Comparative Analysis of Zhang Xuefeng and State Education Talk in the New Media Sphere

Abstract

In the new media era, public educational discourse has tended toward popularization, with Zhang Xuefeng’s educational discourse serving as a typical representative. From the perspective of corpus linguistics, this study constructs two corpora: the Zhang Xuefeng Educational Corpus (ZXC) and the Expert Educational Corpus (EEC) of university scholars. With AntConc, NeoSCA and SPSS adopted, a comparative analysis is conducted on lexical richness and syntactic complexity. The results indicate that there is no significant difference in sentence length between the two types of discourse, while extremely significant differences exist in lexical richness, subordinate structures, coordinate structures and phrasal structures. Overall, Zhang Xuefeng’s discourse tends to be simplified and popular, whereas expert discourse is more rigorous and standardized. This study reveals the differentiation law of popularization and specialization in new media educational discourse, interprets the adaptive value of simplified expression in mass communication, and provides empirical references for optimizing the dissemination of public educational information and balancing professionalism and accessibility.