Cross-strait lexical differences : a comparative study based on Chinese gigaword corpus

Abstract

Studies of cross-strait lexical differences in the use of Mandarin Chinese reveal that a divergence has become increasingly evident. This divergence is apparent in phonological, semantic, and pragmatic analyses and has become an obstacle to knowledge-sharing and information exchange. Given the wide range of divergences, it seems that Chinese character forms offer the most reliable regular mapping between cross-strait usage contrasts. In this study, we take general cross-strait lexical wordforms to discovery of cross-strait lexical differences and explore their contrasts and variations.

Based on Hong and Huang (2006), we discuss the same conceptual words between cross-strait usages by WordNet, Chinese Concept Dictionary (CCD) and Chinese Wordnet (CWN). In this study, we take all words which appear in CCD and CWN to check their lexical contrasts of traditional Chinese character data and simplified Chinese character data in Gigaword Corpus, explore their appearances and distributions, and compare and demonstrate them via Google website.