Abstract
The study of differences between near-synonyms across languages has always been a hot area of research in foreign language teaching and cross-language comparison. A linguistic phenomenon received special attention, Chinese-Japanese homographs often confuse learners since they have same forms yet differ slightly in terms of their meanings and usages. Traditional studies were unfolded mainly in two aspects: case studies on homograph discrimination and division of homographs according to meaning & usage distance. Researches concerning the latter aspect tend to distinguish near-synonyms between languages by means of a three-way classification, i.e. synonyms, heteronyms, and near-synonyms. However, this classification is far from satisfactory in that they cannot measure “near-synonymy” in an accurate and gradable manner since the term “near-synonymy” per se is too broad a term to define. This paper proposes a statistical method for calculating near-synonyms across languages by means of parallel corpus, where translation ratio, F-measure and inter-translation ratio are taken into account as parameters. By means of the F-value, this highly productive method is not only applicable in classifying synonyms, heteronyms, and near-synonyms between Chinese and Japanese, but also allows measuring the meanings & usage distance between cross-linguistic near-synonyms. To prove the effectiveness of this method, around 1900 pairs of Chinese and Japanese near-synonyms are compared and has gained good effects.
Highlights
The issue of near-synonyms has always been a hot topic in the fields of linguistics and Natural Language Processing. [1] On the one hand, many resources were developed from the perspective of traditional linguistics, e.g. “Tongyici Cilin” (Synonymy Thesaurus) [2]
If we use the meaning & usage distance between Chinese and Japanese near-synonyms to describe the difference between Chinese and Japanese, the collection of the distance between Chinese and Japanese near-synonyms will approximately form a continuous line with synonyms and heteronyms as two endpoints
It is this fact that renders the traditional three-way classification method of synonyms, heteronyms and near-synonyms impossible to accurately and objectively describe the differences in meaning & usage between Chinese-Japanese near-synonyms
Summary
The issue of near-synonyms has always been a hot topic in the fields of linguistics and Natural Language Processing. [1] On the one hand, many resources were developed from the perspective of traditional linguistics, e.g. “Tongyici Cilin” (Synonymy Thesaurus) [2]. More related issues need to be further studied [4] Among them are such question as how to measure the meaning & usage distance and how to classify a large number of cross-linguistic near-synonyms according to this measurement. In 1972, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, which affiliates to the Japanese government, asked the Language Education Institute of Waseda University to carry out a research project, titled “中国語と対応する漢語について” (On Kanji and their logographic Chinese counterparts). The theme of this project is to select some commonly-used Chinese-Japanese homographs and to classify them as near-synonyms according to word meanings. Those Kanji collected were divided into three categories, namely, Same (S), Overlap (O), and Different (D), which were based on the
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