A SkE-Assisted Comparison of Three “Prestige” Near Synonyms in Chinese

• Published in: Chinese Lexical Semantics Vol. 11173; pp. 256 - 266
• Main Authors: Li, Longxing, Huang, Chu-Ren, Gao, Xuefeng
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Chinese Word Sketch; Near synonym discrimination
• ISBN: 3030040143; 9783030040147
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_22

The discrimination of near synonyms is one of the most important research areas in lexicology and lexical semantics. Traditional comparative studies of near synonyms are mostly introspection-based and corpus-based, both having disadvantages. Sketch Engine (SkE), a tool designed to automatically obtain grammatical and collocational relations of target words from huge amount of data, helps to avoid subjectivity and solves the problem of utilizing the massive amount of data efficiently. By making use of various functions of Chinese Word Sketch (CWS), this paper distinguishes three Chinese synonymous words mingwang, shengwang and weiwang and finds that shengwang and weiwang are closer in meaning and more similar in grammatical features. Our comprehensive detailed examination of similarities and differences between the three words through CWS will shed light on Chinese lexicography, near synonym discrimination as well as Chinese vocabulary teaching and learning.