Abstract
The discrimination of near synonyms is one of the most important research areas in lexicology and lexical semantics. Traditional comparative studies of near synonyms are mostly introspection-based and corpus-based, both having disadvantages. Sketch Engine (SkE), a tool designed to automatically obtain grammatical and collocational relations of target words from huge amount of data, helps to avoid subjectivity and solves the problem of utilizing the massive amount of data efficiently. By making use of various functions of Chinese Word Sketch (CWS), this paper distinguishes three Chinese synonymous words mingwang, shengwang and weiwang and finds that shengwang and weiwang are closer in meaning and more similar in grammatical features. Our comprehensive detailed examination of similarities and differences between the three words through CWS will shed light on Chinese lexicography, near synonym discrimination as well as Chinese vocabulary teaching and learning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Wang, S., Huang, C.R.: Word sketch lexicography: new perspectives on lexicographic studies of Chinese near synonyms. Lingua Sinica 3(1), 1–22 (2017)
Gao, X.F., Lee, Y.M.: A corpus-based analysis of near-synonymous sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese: “bale” and “eryi”. In: Proceedings of the 31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC31) (2017)
Liu, M.C., Chiang, T.Y., Chou, M.H.: A frame-based approach to polysemous near-synonymy: the case with Mandarin verbs of expression. J. Chin. Lang. Comput. 15(3), 137–148 (2005)
Chang, C.W.: A corpus-based lexical semantic study of Mandarin verbs of hanging: on the near synonym set: Guà, Xuán, Diào. MA thesis, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu (2015)
Zhang, W.X., Qiu, L.K., Song, Z.Y., Chen, B.Y.: Corpus-based quantitative analysis on stylistic difference of Chinese synonyms. Chin. Lang. Learn. 3, 72–80 (2012). (in Chinese)
Chung, S.F.: A corpus-based analysis of “create” and “produce”. Chang Gung J. Humanit. Soc. Sci. 4(2), 399–425 (2011). (in Chinese)
Huang, C.R., et al.: Chinese sketch engine and the extraction of grammatical collocations. In: Proceedings of the Fourth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing, pp. 48–55 (2005)
Zhang, L.: The application of sketch engine in teaching collocations and synonyms. CAFLE 2, 75–78 (2008). (in Chinese)
Wang, S., Huang C.R.: Apply Chinese word sketch engine to facilitate lexicography. In: Deny, A., Nur, W., Lilla, M. (eds.) Lexicography and Dictionaries in the Information Age: Selected Papers from the 8th ASIALEX International Conference, pp. 285–292 (2013)
Ge, X.H.: Core functions and application prospects of sketch engine. TEFLE 04, 23–30 (2017). (in Chinese)
Huang, C.R.: Tagged Chinese Gigaword version 2.0 (2009). https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2009T14.
Xun, E., Rao, G., Xiao, X., Zang, J.: The construction of the BCC corpus in the age of big data. Corpus Linguist. 1, 93–118 (2016). (in Chinese)
Hong, J.F., Huang, C.R.: A corpus-based approach to the discovery of cross-strait lexical contrasts. Lang. Linguist. 9(2), 221–238 (2008). (in Chinese)
Kovář, V., Baisa, V., Jakubíček, M.: Sketch engine for bilingual lexicography. Int. J. Lexicogr. 29(3), 339–352 (2016)
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Joint Supervision Scheme with the Chinese Mainland, Taiwan and Macao Universities sponsored by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project No. G-SB97).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, L., Huang, CR., Gao, X. (2018). A SkE-Assisted Comparison of Three “Prestige” Near Synonyms in Chinese. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04014-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04015-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)