A Study on Chinese Synonyms: From the Perspective of Collocations

摘要

Words are often considered to be synonyms when they share the same meaning. However, there are subtle differences of synonyms appear in actual language use and expressions. Compared to previous approaches mostly based on invented instances, this study uses a corpus-based approach which provides a more comprehensive method to investigate the synonymy through their collocations. This paper examines three pairs of synonyms expressing the concept of something not being "real" with wei-jia being the etymological root, as well as their derivatives wei zhuang-jia zhuang and xu wei-xu jia, words in each pair are often used to simply mutually define one another in dictionaries and do not further explain their differences. Using the statistical method namely Mutual Information to compute data collected from corpus, this paper analyzes the relation between each word and their collocates by looking at the register in which they appear as well as their semantic features and prosody.