A corpus-based comparative study on the semantics and collocations of meili and piaoliang

Abstract

This study demonstrates the importance of corpora in the identification of near-synonyms through a comparative analysis of the near-synonyms 美麗 meili ‘beautiful’ and 漂亮 piaoliang ‘beautiful’. Chinese Word Sketch (CWS) was used to analyse the frequency, common patterns and only patterns of this pair of near-synonyms. Comparison of word meanings, sentence components, and word collocations was carried out. It has been found that when females are the sentence subject, they generally tend to be described as meili. Moreover, when used as a modifier, meili is more suitable than piaoliang in describing nouns that: 1) have broader meanings; 2) have a wider range of local words; and 3) can indicate places.