Semantic Transparency of Radicals in Chinese Characters: An Ontological Perspective

Semantic Transparency of Radicals in Chinese Characters: An Ontological Perspective Yike Yang Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University yi-ke.yang@connect.polyu.hk Chu-Ren Huang Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Sicong Dong The Hong Kong Polytechnic University-Peking University Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics szechungtung@gmail.com Si Chen Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University sarah.chen@polyu.edu.hk Abstract This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency of radicals in Chinese characters and how their perception is related to the onto- logical representation of characters. More spe- cifically, we use semantic transparency as a measurement to compare the perception of na- tive Chinese speakers of various dialects from different regions, including Hong Kong, Main- land China and Taiwan. We explore several factors that may potentially cause convergence or divergence of native speakers’ perception. Our results show that the performances of par- ticipants from various regions converge with each other. From this, we conclude that Chi- nese speakers of various dialects share an onto- logical representation of characters and have an agreement concerning which ontological rela- tion is more closely related to basic concepts, which provides evidence for the psychological reality of Chinese orthography. We also prove that the crowdsourcing method is a powerful and effective tool for empirical linguistic re- search. 1 Introduction The linguistic status of Chinese dialects has been controversial since modern linguistic theories were introduced to the study of Chinese. On one hand, they are traditionally considered as dialects of the same language in Chinese scholarship. On the other hand, they clearly fail the mutual intelligibility test; hence, many linguists prefer to call them Sinitic lan- guages. Although they share the writing system, or- thography is not considered to be a proper module of a linguistic system and was not deemed relevant as evidence for language status in most linguistic theories. However, Chinese orthography is a writing system consisting of both the signifiers and the sig- nified. Sharing the signifiers clearly does not entail affinity for the linguistic status, but sharing the sig- nified could mean sharing the (lexical) semantic system representation of conceptual systems. In other words, shared orthography should not be dis- counted as evidence for a linguistic relationship a priori. Instead, what needs to be examined is whether there is a relevant linguistic level that is shared. Sproat (2000) suggests that, although pho- nology is the orthographically relevant level (ORL), semantics should be the ORL for the Chinese writ- ing system. Huang et al. (2013) and Huang and Hsieh (2015) further argue that the semantic system underpinning this ORL is ontologically motivated, as described in Huang et al. (2010a). In this study, we use semantic transparency as a measurement to test whether the ontological system underpinning the Chinese writing system is shared by speakers of different Chinese dialects. The pur- pose of this study is twofold. Firstly, we aim to test the robustness and psychological reality of the on- tological …

Content truncated to 500 words