THE INTERPRETATION OF THE MODERN CHINESE CHARACTER “LION” FROM A CORPUS PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Due to the worldwide boom in learning Chinese, foreigners studying Chinese are putting higher demands on the compilation and functions of Chinese learning dictionaries. Compared with English language dictionaries, Chinese dictionaries have gaps in the number of meaning items and the use of new technologies. Taking the animal noun “lion” (狮) as an example, we searched through all 8,787 items containing the word “lion” from the CCL corpus of Peking University, and analyzed and annotated them one by one. Using the theory of Qualia structure, we analyzed each type of object role of “lion” and revised the meaning of the animal noun definition of “lion” so that the interpretation of the meaning of “lion” was made more scientific. It was also found that two noun meanings for the word “lion” could added to the Chinese dictionary, namely, the definition “a form of folk performance or a prop for folk performance” and the definition “a man-made object shaped like a lion”. Through the Qualia structure, a relatively unified interpretation model was constructed for each type of noun, and corpus technology discovered new items of nouns interpretation, thus enriching the means of compilation of modern Chinese dictionaries, which will make the interpretation more scientific and standardized, and enhance the practicality and comfort of use of the dictionaries.