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Lexical Priming: Applications and advances
Edited by Michael Pace-Sigge and Katie J. Patterson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 79] 2017
► pp. 163–185

Teaching near-synonyms more effectively

A case study of “happy” words in Mandarin Chinese

| Xi’an Jiaotong University, China | University of Liverpool, UK

The purpose of this study is to explore ways to effectively explain how Chinese near-synonyms are distinguished based on corpus exploration. Lexical priming provides a theoretical framework for the collocational and colligational analysis of Chinese synonyms. A group of Mandarin Chinese “happy” words 高兴 (gāo xìng), 快乐 (kuài lè) and 开心 (kāi xīn) are chosen for the case study. The result shows that the three Chinese synonyms could be distinguished based on corpus analysis, which may provide useful reference for teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background of the study
    • 2.1Use of corpora in second/foreign language teaching
    • 2.2The expansion and problems of Mandarin Chinese teaching
    • 2.3Corpus approaches to synonyms and lexical priming
  • 3.Setting up the study
  • 4.Purpose and Methodology of the study
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Chinese grammatical terms
    • 5.2Collocation and semantic association
    • 5.3Colligation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • 7.Limitations and future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.79.07sha
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