An Empirical Study Of POS Labeling In The Concise Chinese-Japanese Dictionary (The Revised Edition)

With the development of economy and the rapid growth of the international statusof China, learning Chinese as a foreign language is becoming popular all over theworld. Mandarin fever is a common phenomenon in global language communicationsystem, which increases the demands of the dictionaries of Chinese as a foreignlanguage. The Concise Chinese-Japanese Dictionary (the Revised Edition)(hereinafter“CCJD” for short) studied in the thesis is such a dictionary which is designed to helpJapanese learners learn Chinese. Although the study of Chinese word classes has ahistory of over2000years, the judgment of word class is still disputable. For Chinesedictionary compilers, labeling parts of speech is a long-standing problem. It’s a morelong-standing problem for dictionaries of Chinese as a foreign language. Therefore, thestudy of word class becomes a hotspot. Among all the dictionaries of Chinese as aforeign language, there are many researches related to the parts of speech labelinginformation among Chinese-English dictionaries, while the study of Chinese-Japanesedictionaries is one in a million. Among the previous studies, the following aspects arecontroversial: the distinction between words and non-words, the treatment of multipleclass membership and the implementation of the Principle of Translating by POS.Based on the prudent data collected from CCJD and data sampled from the ModernChinese Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University (hereinaftercalled CCL corpus), this thesis also focuses on the mentioned aspects above in order tosee whether the results in the dictionary are similar to the results done by the previousscholars.Based on the Usage-based Theory and Prototype Theory, this thesis does a surveyon the above aspects. The results show that words in the CCJD take on an obviousprototype effect and the most typical words in the dictionary are disyllables; as for thetreatment of multiple class membership in this dictionary, it gives the typical wordclass, but the loss of functional meaning is serious, in other words, the situation that one word has one word class is very typical, which makes us think that the dictionarycompilers reduce the number of multi-category words; in terms of all the labeled items,most of them follow the Principle of Translating by POS and those that don’t followthe Principle of Translating by POS are mainly adjectives. We guess the reason for thisis that there are adjectives and adjectival verbs in Japanese, while in Chinese both ofthem are labeled as adjectives.This study can not only shed new light on POS labeling for Modern Chinesedictionaries, dictionaries of Chinese as a second language and POS tagging in modernChinese corpus construction, but also have theoretical significance for modern Chinesegrammar studies.