Exploring Discourse on Same-sex Marriage in Taiwan: A Case Study of Near-Synonym of HOMOSEXUAL in Opposing Stances

Exploring Discourse on Same-sex Marriage in Taiwan: A Case Study of Near-Synonym of HOMOSEXUAL in Opposing Stances Han-Tang Hung Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Taiwan University r07142007@ntu.edu.com Shu-Kai Hsieh Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Taiwan University shukaihsieh@ntu.edu.tw Abstract This research explores the intense con- flict of the legalization of same-sex mar- riage in Taiwan by studying how the near-synonyms denoting homosexual, 同 志 tóngzhì and 同性戀 tóngxìngliàn, are used by the opposing stances. Two re- search questions related to lexical seman- tics are addressed, i.e., what the seman- tic difference of these two lexical items is and how these two are characteristically used by each stance. Collocational anal- ysis with self-compiled corpora is the pri- mary method in this study. For the first question, it is found that the meanings of the pair can be differentiated along an internal-external axis. With regards to the second one, it is discovered that, the oppo- nents of same-sex marriage are inclined to externalize the innateness of homosexual, whereas the supporters tend to reduce the distinctiveness of homosexuality and call for the universality of human rights by the strategies of juxtaposing and compound- ing. 1 Introduction Taiwan has become the first in Asia to legal- ize same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, intense de- bate on whether same-sex marriage should be legalized between the pro- and against-same-sex marriage groups has not lessened. In the debate, discourses around homosexual has been repro- duced and circulated, many of which concern the consequence of same-sex marriage, such as ho- mosexual education, civil law of adopting child and homosexual parenting. This paper aims to address the question of the conflict between op- posing stances at the level of lexical semantics. I will use ’homosexual’ as a keyword and exam- ine how the word is used in each stance on the issue with help of distributional corpus analysis. However, this issue is complicated by the fact that there are two synonymous words in Man- darin Chinese, that is tóngxìngliàn and tóngzhì, both of which are used frequently and can be used under similar register and genre. This pa- per addresses two research questions: 1. From their collocational behavior, what are the semantic difference between tóngzhì and tóngxìngliàn? 2. What are the characteristic usages of these two words in the opposing stances? What is the relationship between the stances and choices of words? Below I will first introduce these two words and discuss in what sense they are near synony- mous. 1.1 Origin of the two words: tóngxìngliàn and tóngzhì In English world, the word homosexual, accord- ing to Tamagne (2004), came into existence at the end of the 19th century and was allegedly first used by the Hungarian journalist Karoly Maria Kertbeny in 1869. Before the introduc- tion of the homosexual-heterosexual distinction, “being homosexual was not seen as a quality of the individual but as a quality of a single act, which was equated with sodomy” (Tam- agne, 2004: 7). Concerning the word denoting homosexual in Chinese, the word tóngxìngliàn came earlier …

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