A Comparable Corpus-Based Study of Cross-Strait Varieties: The Case of [phrase omitted] and [phrase omitted] Zhuanxin

Chinese Word Sketch (CWS) provides a tool to identify the semantic distinctions of the Chinese near synonyms in the natural language use situation. This study has the case of [phrase omitted] Zhuyi and [phrase omitted] Zhuanxin, with Gigaword_CNA and Gigaword_XIN, two of the main sub-corpora in CWS, as the corpora for the research. Based on the comparison of senses and part of speech (POS) from Chinese Word Net and dictionaries, it is found that there are some disagreements of the POS between the ones prescribed by dictionary and in actual language use. What is more, some similarities and differences have been revealed based on the common and only patterns in the two sub-corpora. The study aims to reveal the variations of the two keywords in Taiwan Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin, which will contribute to the revision of the dictionary and facilitate a better understanding of cross-strait communication. Index Terms--Chinese word sketch, corpus, near-synonyms, variations