Abstract
This study explored lexical ambiguity in Mandarin Chinese. Previous studies have concentrated on the lexical ambiguity resolution of nouns and verbs in the sentential context, while others presented different results for ambiguity resolution in English and Italian. Based on [1] study, which focused on the cognitive processing of strong bias words in the sentential context, the current study proposed two modular and interactive hypotheses and designed two experiments—a production test and a YES-NO test—to distinguish lexical and metaphorical bias found in Mandarin Chinese. This article would present the results of the two experiments, followed by a discussion of the related senses of lexical ambiguity in Mandarin Chinese.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ahrens, K.: The effect of visual target presentation times on lexical ambiguity resolution. Lang. Linguist. 7(3), 677–696 (2006)
Lexical Data Consortium: Chinese Gigaword Corpus 2.5 (2005). http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2005T14
Ahrens, K.: On-line sentence comprehension of ambiguous verbs in Mandarin. J. East Asian Linguis. 10(4), 337–358 (2001)
Lin, C., Ahrens, K.: Calculating the number of senses: implications for ambiguity advantage effect during lexical access. In: Tai, H.Y., Chang, Y.L. (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics, pp. 141–155. National Chung-Cheng University, Chai-yi (2000)
Li, P.: Crosslinguistic variation and sentence processing: the case of Chinese. In: Hillert, D. (ed.) Sentence Processing: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, pp. 35–53. Academic Press, San Diego (1998)
Li, P., Yip, M.C.: Lexical ambiguity and context effects in spoken word recognition: evidence from Chinese. In: Cottrell, G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 228–232 (1996)
Li, P., Yip, M.C.: Context effects and processing of spoken homophones. Read. Writ.: Interdiscip. J. 10, 223–243 (1998)
Ahrens, K.: Lexical ambiguity resolution: languages, tasks and timing. In: Hillert, D. (ed.) Sentence Processing: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, pp. 11–31. Academic Press, San Diego, CA (1998)
Tabossi, P., Zardon, F.: Processing ambiguous words in context. J. Mem. Lang. 32, 359–372 (1993)
Huang, C.-R., Chen, K.-J., Hsieh, S.-K.: Mandarin Chinese Words and Parts of Speech: A Corpus-Based Study. Routledge (2017)
Ma, W.-Y., Huang, C.-R.: Uniform and effective tagging of a heterogeneous giga-word corpus. Presented at the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2006), Genoa, Italy, 24–28 May 2006
Kilgarriff, A., RychlĂ˝, P., Smrz, P., Tugwell, D.: The sketch engine. In: Proceedings of EURALEX, Lorient, France (2004). http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/
Kilgarriff, A., et al.: Word sketches for Irish and Chinese. Presented at corpus linguistics 2005, Birmingham, UK, 14–17 July 2005
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., under Grant no. MOST 107-2410-H-003-053. I also would like to thank Prof. Kathleen Ahrens for her feedback on this paper.
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
Hong, JF. (2018). A Study on Lexical Ambiguity in Mandarin 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_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_39
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)