Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near-synonymy: The HELP Verbs in Mandarin Chinese
Shu-Ping Gong, PEI-YAN WU · International Journal of Computer Processing Of Languages · 2012
In this study, our goal was to find out how the verbs 幫忙 bāngmáng and 幫助 bāngzhù differ in usage. In particular, we aimed to determine the characteristics of the co-occurrences for the two verbs to investigate whether the verb 幫忙 bāngmáng typically takes an event as an object with positive or neutral collocates and whether the verb 幫助 bāngzhù typically takes a person/an organization as an object with negative collocates. Data for the two synonymous verbs were collected from the Chinese GigaWord Corpus using Chinese Word Sketch. As we predicted, our corpus data showed that 幫忙 bāngmáng typically took an event as an object and 幫助 bāngzhù typically took a person/an organization as an object, and that the verb 幫助 bāngzhù was more often linked with lexical items that had negative meanings. Based on the results presented, this study has practical implications for second language acquisition, translation, and dictionary compiling.