Calculating the Distance Between Near-Synonyms Across Languages: A Case Study on Chinese and Japanese
Shi Jianjun · International Journal of Language and Linguistics · 2019
The study of differences between near-synonyms across languages has always been a hot area of research in foreign language teaching and cross-language comparison. A linguistic phenomenon received special attention, Chinese-Japanese homographs often confuse learners since they have same forms yet differ slightly in terms of their meanings and usages. Traditional studies were unfolded mainly in two aspects: case studies on homograph discrimination and division of homographs according to meaning & usage distance. Researches concerning the latter aspect tend to distinguish near-synonyms between languages by means of a three-way classification, i.e. synonyms, heteronyms, and near-synonyms. However, this classification is far from satisfactory in that they cannot measure “near-synonymy” in an accurate and gradable manner since the term “near-synonymy” per se is too broad a term to define. This paper proposes a statistical method for calculating near-synonyms across languages by means of parallel corpus, where translation ratio, F-measure and inter-translation ratio are taken into account as parameters. By means of the F-value, this highly productive method is not only applicable in classifying synonyms, heteronyms, and near-synonyms between Chinese and Japanese, but also allows measuring the meanings & usage distance between cross-linguistic near-synonyms. To prove the effectiveness of this method, around 1900 pairs of Chinese and Japanese near-synonyms are compared and has gained good effects.