Abstract: Based on the Modern Chinese General Balance Corpus (developed by the National Language Committee), using Biber multi-feature approach and EmEdito, ROST PreLang, and SPSS software, this paper has made a quantitative comparison of 63 language features between fiction and biographies, and has given functional explanations in connection with their situation characteristics. The result reveals: there are significant differences in 51 linguistic features between fiction and biographies; as two lower branches of literature registers, the 20 top high-frequency words used in these two registers are highly overlapped with the Chinese highfrequency words list, and there is no special vocabulary dedicated to these two registers; the relationship among top high-frequency words, rare words and the coverage of the word types also conforms to the basic rules presented in general registers. The same channel and production environment result in standard language used both in fiction and biographies; while different topics, scenes, relations of participants and purpose of communication lead to the differences in situation-dependent, written styles, interactions, involvement and emotions,and these five dimensions differences have been presented by the frequency differences of more than 50 language features in these two registers.

Key words: registers, fiction, biographies, linguistic features, corpus