A Synchronous Corpus-Based Study on the Usage and Perception of Judgement Terms in the Pan-Chinese Context

Abstract

This paper reports on a synchronous corpus-based study of the everyday usage of a set of Chinese judgement terms. An earlier study on Hong Kong data found that these terms were more polysemous than their English counterparts within the legal domain, and were even more fuzzily used in general news reportage. The current study further compares their usage in general texts from other Chinese speech communities (Beijing, Taiwan, and Singapore) to explore the regional differences in lexicalisation and perception of the relevant legal concepts. Corpus data revealed the distinctiveness of the Singapore data, and that the contrasting frequency distributions of the terms and senses could be a result of the varied focus in reportage or the use of alternative expressions for the same concepts in individual communities. The analysis will contribute to the construction and enrichment of Pan-Chinese lexico-semantic resources, which will be useful for many natural language processing applications, such as machine translation.