Abstract
The synonym of epistemic “think” in Chinese is understudied. This study surveys the usage of five synonyms of verbs related to “think” – renwei, juede, yiwei, xiang, and kaolü – by using the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. By studying the contexts of the target verbs, we report the distributions of three types of nouns and two types of adverbs in relation to the target verbs among three genres, and then we discuss their potential effects on epistemic evidentiality. Next, we conduct a survey study to examine native speakers’ judgments of the epistemic evidentiality of sentences that contain the five target verbs with the types of nouns and adverbs extracted from the Sinia corpus. The results show that “renwei” has the highest ratings of evidentiality, followed by “juede,” while “yiwei” and “xiang” have the lowest mean ratings. “Kaolü” is often regarded as irrelevant or neutral concerning epistemic evidentiality.
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Notes
- 1.
Institute of Languages, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: 2021-11-13.
- 2.
- 3.
Ten units is the maximum range of queries and data collection allowed in the corpus.
- 4.
Indicates the relevance of the search content to the keywords. When the relevance is tighter, the mutual information is higher. Here MI ≥ 1 is used to maximize the identification of relevant results and avoid missing important information.
- 5.
The relevant POS and abbreviations in this study refer to the descriptions of Sinica.
- 6.
Nouns in the corpus include Na, Nb, Nc, Ncd, Nd, Neu, Nes, Nep, Neqa, Neqb, Nf, Ng, Nh, and Nv.
- 7.
The maximum statistical range of the database is only 10 units, and the minimum value of MI is 1. When we analyzed the data, we further processed and filtered out the first 10 or last 10 units of the keywords (epistemic verbs), in which MI was ≥1.
- 8.
In the corpus, DE, Di, Da, Dk, Dh, and Dd are not assertive per se, so they are not taken into account here, and the number of Dd and Dh among them is extremely low and is not informative.
- 9.
There are six major themes in the corpus: philosophy, science, art, literature, society, and life. If all of them are involved, the questionnaire will be too large and exhausting for the participants, and the validity of the questionnaire results cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, we classified them according to the disciplinary composition method [8], and consolidated the humanities into broader categories, specifically “Philosophy, Science, Art, and Literature.”
- 10.
Linguistics, Law, Technology, Mathematics, Education, Management, Engineering, Materials Science, Labor Relations, Architecture, Secretarial Science, International Trade, Advertising, Journalism, Environmental Engineering, Comparative Literature, Music, Business Administration, Applied Mathematics, Broadcasting, Nursing.
- 11.
When the mean is higher than 1.5, it indicates that the majority has chosen the option with high evidentiality. Conversely, when the mean is lower, it shows that the majority has chosen the option with low evidentiality.
- 12.
When the standard deviation is equal to 0.5, it indicates that the same number of people have chosen the high and low options respectively, and that the data are normally distributed. When the standard deviation of the results is greater than the difference of 0.5, it indicates that the subjects have a clear tendency to be consistent in their assertion of the evidentiality of the sentence in which the epistemic verb is located.
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Ye, Y., Hsu, YY. (2024). Native Speakers’ Judgment of the Epistemic Evidentiality of Synonym Verbs of “Think” in Mandarin: A Corpus-Based Study of Renwei, Yiwei, Juede, Kaolü, and Xiang. In: Dong, M., Hong, JF., Lin, J., Jin, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14515. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0586-3_24
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