A Corpus-based Analysis of Character Usage in Chinese Transliteration: A Case Study of Newspapers in Taiwan and Mainland China
| Autor: | Yen-Chi Cheng, 鄭諺祺 |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 101 The primary difference between transliteration in Chinese and that in other languages is the necessity of choosing one among many homophonous characters of the pronunciation that is chosen to represent the source language sound. Most previous transliteration studies that discuss the principles of the character choosing process were qualitative, using reference books such as transliteration dictionaries as sources, while few were primary-data-driven quantitative analyses. This study attempts to find the productive characters in contemporary Chinese transliteration and describe the norms of contemporary Chinese transliteration from a corpus-based, statistical approach. The researcher compiles four news corpora from Taiwan and Mainland China news websites. Four transliteration sub-corpora are then compiled by extracting from these news corpora transliterations with their corresponding source language words in parentheses and annotating them as “person” (with gender tags when possible), “place” or “other entity” according to the nature of their referents. The researcher observes the distribution of the characters in the transliteration sub-corpora vis-a-vis the news corpora as well as the difference in character usage under various conditions using log-likelihood ratio tests. The result shows that roughly 80% of the characters used in transliteration are common to all categories of transliterations, while the rest 20% tend significantly to be used under certain conditions, a sign of the non-homogeneity within the norm of character usage in Chinese transliteration. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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