Word sketch lexicography: new perspectives on lexicographic studies of Chinese near synonyms

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.

Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Gambling and Gaming in the Past Centuries

“…SkE offers a range of functions, such as Concordancing, Thesaurus, Word Sketch, and Sketch Difference, and has been widely adopted in lexicography, discourse studies, translation studies, language teaching and learning, and so on. SkE can contrast grammatical and collocational relations between near synonyms by processing a huge amount of authentic data (Wang & Huang, 2017) and triangulate the findings obtained through its different functions (Li et al, , 2020. Near synonym-driven research is one of the most productive approaches in corpus linguistics, pioneered by Atkins and Levin (1995) for English and Tsai et al (1998) for Chinese.…”

A Comparable Corpus-Based Study of Cross-Strait Varieties: The Case of 注意 Zhùyì and 專心 Zhuānxīn

“…Although the above studies had some groundbreaking findings of the Chinese synonyms, using corpora to discriminate near-synonyms has only focused on limited examples (Wang & Huang, 2017). Moreover, it needs further exploration based on CWS instead of the mere KWIC method in comparing Chinese near-synonyms.…”

“…Gigaword_CNA and Gigaword_XIN are sub-corpora of CWS, the former including news texts from Xinhua News Agency of Beijing with 382, 881,000 tokens, and the latter from Central News Agency of Taiwan with 735, 499, 000 tokens (Wang & Huang, 2017). Based on CWS, it shows that 注 意 zhùyì has a much higher frequency than 專心 zhuānxīn in Gigaword2.…”

“…According to Jiang (2018), corpus-based lexical comparisons between Taiwan and the Mainland are mainly about a thesaurus, celebrity coverage in the Chinese press, Chinese news headlines. However, the research on near synonyms based on corpus "has only focused on certain examples" (Wang & Huang, 2017). Hence it is far from sufficient.…”