A Study on the Interpretation of the Modern Chinese Character "duck" from a Corpus Perspective

Abstract

More and more foreigners are joining the ranks of Chinese language learners, which puts higher demands on Chinese learning dictionaries. Chinese dictionaries have some gaps with English dictionaries regarding the number of meaningful items and the use of new technologies. The qualia structure is the most distinctive and representative theory of  the generative lexicon theory, which depicts the semantics of nouns at four levels: formal role, constitutive role，telic role, agentive role. These four roles demonstrate the encyclopedic knowledge of noun denotative entities and greatly enrich the semantic connotation of nouns, which is a breakthrough in both breadth and depth compared with the previous semantic descriptions of nouns, and is an important guide to the in-depth portrayal of the semantics of nouns. The article takes the noun "duck" (鸭) as an example, and searches all 8,356 items of the CCL corpus of Peking University for the word "duck", annotates them one by one, and analyzes their object roles by using the theory of qualia structure. We found that the Chinese dictionary can add two noun meanings for the word "duck": meat of duck or food made of duck; and male prostitute.