A Corpus-based Study On Categorized Definition Of Confucian Words In Chinese-english Dictionaries

As the essence of Chinese traditional culture,Confucian words are the main body of carrying forward Chinese culture and inheriting Chinese civilization,which is of great significance to the development and promotion of Chinese excellent traditional culture.C-E dictionary is an important tool for foreigners to learn Chinese.Therefore,it is very important for Chinese cultural strategy of “going out” to improve the quality of C-E dictionaries on the definition of Confucian words.However,the current definition models of the mainstream C-E dictionaries are mainly based on the intuition methods,which can not realize the holographic representation of Confucian words.So to some extent,it not only weakens the effect of definition representation of Confucian words,but also hinders cross-linguistic cultural understanding and communication.In this paper,55 Confucian words are taken as research objects,and their definitions in 5 C-E dictionaries are systematically investigated by corpus-based retrieval and data analysis.Furthermore,on the basis of the status quo of Confucian words and through sampling analysis,the present study integrates The Theory of Norms and Exploitations with The Theoretical Model of Definition Based on Schema-Instance Relation to construct a new bottom-up categorized definition model for C-E dictionaries.The results of the study show that:(1)the definition pattern of some C-E dictionaries is still mainly based on intuition method,which shows obvious interdependent phenomena;(2)the definition representation of Confucian words in some C-E dictionaries needs to be improved urgently,especially in the following problems: first,the sense granularity is too fine,but the sense hierarchy is not strong;second,the category schema characteristic of the definition is not obvious;third,the example disposition is not systematic;forth,the cultural information is lacking.(3)the researches and practices on definition of mainstream C-E dictionaries do notmake full use of corpus.Therefore,the new categorized definition model extracts the source language information from the Chinese corpus based on corpus-driven model,and finds out concrete meanings according to the source language information.Then,based on the new categorized definition model,the core general sense,the peripheral general sense and the marginal general sense are generalized in the low-level schema.Finally,the senses are arranged according to the schema category relationship and the frequency of the senses.The exact translations of different senses are sought from the parallel corpus,which can also provide examples and cultural information.The new definition model can contribute to improve the definition and representative performances of Confucian words in C-E dictionaries to some degree.In addition,it can also play a positive role in deepening the study of lexicology,enhancing the quality of dictionary compilation,promoting the international promotion of Chinese language as well as the exchange of culture among different countries.