Abstract
Comparative study of near synonyms is one of the most productive research paradigms in Chinese lexicography. Empirical studies to discriminate near synonyms are either introspection-based or corpus-based. Yet, due to the large quantity of data in a corpus, lexicological studies of Chinese rarely make full use of the corpus data. To solve this problem, Kilgarriff’s Word Sketch Engine is designed to automatically obtain grammatical and collocational relations of target words from corpora for researchers to further analyze them. Chinese Word Sketch (CWS), a language specific version of Word Sketch Engine, provides a tool to automatically identify grammatical information for Gigaword size corpora. Through a comparative study of the synonymous emotion words 愉快 yúkuài 'pleasant' and 高興 gāoxìng 'happy', this paper illustrates how CWS can distinguish them and help lexicographers to discriminate their subtle differences. In particular, it focuses on the context where these synonymous words can be used to define each other and context where they should be differentiated. It also discusses how to select information from CWS such that the information represented would be suitable for lexicographic studies. Through the study of near synonyms, we propose that Word Sketch Lexicography will lead the next generation of dictionaries.
Highlights
The Chinese language has a large number of synonyms
We propose that Word Sketch Lexicography will lead the generation of dictionaries
Generalization and definitions in Chinese lexicography are typically still created without making full use of a corpus
Summary
The Chinese language has a large number of synonyms. The teaching and learning of synonyms is difficult but important in language teaching. The synonym discrimination is entering the third stage, which uses Word Sketch Engine to process the concordance lines from a corpus (Wang and Huang 2013a; Wu and Wang 2016) It obtains the grammatical and collocational relations of the target word, so researchers can further analyze it based on the results. Compared with the first two methods, the third method of using Word Sketch Engine can classify the corpus data according to the grammatical functions, which can reflect the differences and characteristics between the synonyms through authentic data. It in turn helps researchers quickly and prominently grasp the tendency of how to use the synonyms. We propose that Word Sketch Lexicography will lead the generation of dictionaries
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