A Semantic Study of Coordinate Compounds in Chinese

A Semantic Study of Coordinate Compounds in Chinese Yingdi Jiang1,2, Yonglian Yu3 and Zhiying Liu*1,2 1Institute of Chinese Information Processing, Beijing Normal University 2UltraPower-BNU Joint Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University 3Institute of Advanced Study of the Humanities and Religion, Beijing Normal University Beijing, China {de, yvonne21}@mail.bnu.edu.cn, liuzhy@bnu.edu.cn Abstract The coordinate compound is an indispensable part of Chinese. We divide the compound words into three types. They are synonymous compounds, related compounds and opposite compounds. Based on the previous researches, we use the method of word embedding to study them from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. First of all, the formation time, the process and result of semantic changes of these three kinds of compound words have been discussed. Then from the synchronic perspective, this paper studies the usage and characteristics of three kinds of compound words in modern Chinese. 1 Introduction Coordinate compound plays an important part in modern Chinese. It has gone through a long historical development process from monosyllabic words to phrases to coordinate compounds, and then it was finally fixed in the form of words. Ma (1983) put the Coordinate Compounds into “Pianlie” ( 骈 列 ). At present, the definition of coordinate compound is that a word composed of two identical, similar, related, or opposite roots (Huang and Liao, 2002). From the perspective of meaning, scholars in linguistics have different views on the classification of coordinate compounds. Ma (1983) and Hu (1995) thought that coordinate compounds should be divided into two categories. They are synonym and antonym. Li (2007) and Xiang (1993) preferred to three kinds, they are synonymy, related word and antonym, while Xing (2015) thought that dividing them into synonymy, related word, antonym and partial word would be better. Moreover, Ren (1981) inherited the view of Xing and then divided related word into related morpheme and distant morpheme. In this paper, we tend to divide the coordinate compounds into three types. They are synonymous compounds, related compounds and opposite compounds. (1) The first type is synonymous compound. It refers to compound words composed of two synonymous or near-synonymous morphemes. Under these circumstances, the meanings of the two morphemes A and B may not be exactly the same, or they each have multiple meanings. e.g. 阿 荣 的 面 庞 愈 发 显 得 白 皙 、 娇 艳 。 （《生为女人》） A Rong’s face is more and more white and beautiful. (Born as a woman) In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, "bai" was interpreted as "Western color”. When a funeral was held, everything must be white. “Skin white” was indicated as “xi” ( 皙 ). While in the Modern Chinese Dictionary, “bai and xi” (白皙) means the skin color of somebody is very white. (2) The second one is related compound. It is a combination of two meaning-related morphemes. PACLIC 32 232 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the authors Therefore, the meanings of the two morphemes A and B are completely irrelevant. They …

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