近義詞ADMIT 和 CONFESS—以語料庫及問卷為本之研究

An Analysis of the Near-Synonyms ADMIT and CONFESS based on Corpus and Questionnaire

王慶華(Wang Ching-Hua)

指導教授 ： 鍾曉芳

國立政治大學/外國語文學院/英國語文學系/碩士(2021年)

https://doi.org/10.6814/NCCU202100542

摘要

近義詞組ADMIT及CONFESS於語義及句法使用上皆有重疊之處，例如：兩者皆能銜接名詞片語、介系詞片語以及that子句等。雖然這組近義詞組在語義或句法上的使用皆十分雷同，然而，在過往研究中並未論及兩者的差異，因此，本研究採用語料庫研究法，以《英國國家語料庫》（British National Corpus）作為研究工具，檢索ADMIT及CONFESS作為動詞的語料，並且從中隨機分別抽樣300筆進行分析。本研究採用短語的概念，包含了ADMIT及CONFESS的句法結構及ADMIT及CONFESS的語境之分析。另外，根據語料庫分析結果和從辭典中提取出的語義特徵，本研究亦包含一份問卷，此問卷旨在檢驗英語者使用ADMIT和CONFESS時，面對不同的句法結構和語義特徵，是否影響這組近義詞的選用傾向。
研究結果顯示ADMIT比CONFESS具有較高的使用頻率。此外，ADMIT擁有較 多的語義，另一方面，CONFESS則是被用來描述更狹窄且特定的語義。最後，ADMIT和不同的句法結構的搭配分佈較為平均，而CONFESS則更傾向與特定句型搭配。
最後，本研究希望透過分析這組近義詞組在句法、語境及語義特徵的差異，來區辨ADMIT和CONFESS，並提供此方法以區辨別組近義詞組。

關鍵字

近義詞 ； 語料庫 ； 短語 ； 問卷

並列摘要

This study shows a corpus and questionnaire study of the near-synonymous pair, ADMIT and CONFESS. Both words share a similar meaning and have overlaps of sentence patterns. For instance, both words can be followed by a noun phrase, a prepositional phrase, and a that-clause, respectively. Even though the two words behave similarly, no corpus-based analysis on the two near-synonyms can be seen. Thus, we utilized the British National Corpus to extract the concordance lines of ADMIT and CONFESS for the following analysis. By adopting the concepts of phraseology, the study includes the analysis of syntactic structures and semantic contexts of ADMIT and CONFESS.
On top of the results of the corpus analysis and the semantic features extracted from the dictionaries, we also included a questionnaire. The questionnaire aimed to examine English native speakers’ word selections of ADMIT and CONFESS when different syntactic structures and semantic features of the two words were manipulated.
Overall, the results of the study showed that ADMIT has a much higher usage frequency than CONFESS does. Second, ADMIT contains more definitions and it can be used to convey more general meanings. By contrast, CONFESS is mostly used to describe more specific meanings. Lastly, ADMIT collocates more evenly with different syntactic structures while CONFESS shows a more specific tendency with certain syntactic structures. The results can shed light on the usage of the two words and provide the way to be applied for other pairs of near-synonyms as well.

並列關鍵字

Near-synonyms ； ADMIT ； CONFESS ； Corpus ； Phraseology ； Questionnaire

參考文獻

REFERENCES

Bergler, S. (1991, April). The semantics of collocational patterns for reporting verbs. In Proceedings of the fifth conference on European chapter of the Association for

Computational Linguistics (pp. 216-221). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bergler, S. (1993, September). Semantic dimensions in the field of reporting verbs. In Proceedings of the ninth annual conference of the University of Waterloo

Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary and Text Research (pp. 1-11).