Abstract
This paper examines several reform-related Chinese near synonyms in the thousand-year long history of China, comparing them in both diachronic and synchronic dimensions. Through the enquiries of word frequency and usages in diachronic Chinese corpora and historical Chinese language databases, the results reveal the interplay between social realities and language use This study is an initial effort to relating a number of socially and historically significant synonymous words to the thousand-year long history of China through corpus linguistic enquiry.
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 subscriptionsChange history
06 August 2022
In an older version of this paper, there was an error in the affiliation of co-author, Longxing Li. This has now been corrected to: “Faculty of Languages and Translation, Macao Polytechnic University”.
References
Qi, X.: A History of Reforms in China. Hebei Education Press, Shijiazhuang (1997).(in Chinese)
Qi, X., Jiang, X.: Preface of general history of reforms in China. J. Hebei Univ. (Philos. Soc. Sci.) 04, 38–40 (1998). (in Chinese)
Ryan, S.M.: Reform. In: Burgett, B., Hendler, G. (eds.), Keywords for American Cultural Studies. NYU Press, New York (2007)
Hindess, B.: Reform and revolution. In: Bennett, T., Grossberg, L., Morris, M. (eds.), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, pp. 300–304. Blackwell Publishing (2005)
Williams, R.: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press. (1976, 1983, 2015)
Li, L., Dong, S., Wang, X.: Gaige and reform: a Chinese-English comparative keywords study. In: Su, Q., Zhan, W. (eds.) From Minimal Contrast to Meaning Construct: Corpus-based, Near Synonym Driven Approaches to Chinese Lexical Semantics, pp. 321–332. Springer, Singapore (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_22
Li, L., Wang, X.: Gaige (Reform) in Mandarin Chinese across the Taiwan Strait: a corpus-assisted comparative keywords study. In: Language and Culture Studies at Macao, pp. 104–113 (2019). (in Chinese)
Hilpert, M.: The great temptation: what diachronic corpora do and do not reveal about social change. In: Rautionaho, P., Nurmi, A., Klemola, J. (eds.), Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the evolution of English, pp. 3–27. John Benjamins (2020)
Teubert, W., Krishnamurthy, R.: Corpus Linguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Routledge, Milton Park (2007)
Baker, P., McEnery, T.: A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts. J. Lang. Politics. 4(2), 197–226 (2005)
Li, L., Huang, C.-R., Gao, X.: A SkE-assisted comparison of three “prestige” near synonyms in Chinese. In: Hong, J.-F., Su, Q., Wu, J.-S. (eds.) Chinese Lexical. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 11173, pp. 256–266. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_22
Li, L., Huang, C.-R., Wang, X.: Lexical competition and change: a corpus-assisted investigation of gambling and gaming in the past centuries. SAGE Open 10(3), 1–14 (2020)
Xun, E., Rao, G., Xiao, X., Zang, J.: The construction of the BCC corpus in the age of big data. Corpus Linguist. 3(1), 93–109 (2016)
Zhan, W., Guo, R., Chang, B., Shen, Y., Chen, L.: The building of the CCL corpus: its design and implementation. Corpus Linguist. 6(1), 71–86 (2019)
Wang, X., Huang, C.-R.: From near synonyms to power relation variations in communication: a cross-strait comparison of “Guli” and “Mianli.” In: Hong, J.-F., Su, Q., Wu, J.-S. (eds.) Chinese Lexical Semantics. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 11173, pp. 155–166. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_13
Acknowledgments
The first and the second authors would like to acknowledge the research project RP/FLT-04/2022 supported by the Macao Polytechnic University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, L., Wang, V.X., Huang, CR. (2022). Social Changes Manifested in the Diachronic Changes of Reform-Related Chinese Near Synonyms. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06546-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06547-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)