Semantic relationships in Mandarin speech errors

Abstract

This paper investigates various patterns in a corpus of naturally-occurring lexical substitution speech errors to show how Mandarin speakers produce such lexical items and how they relate to the lexical-semantic relationships in Mandarin lexicon. Target-error pairs often share similar semantic features or are semantically-related associates and can be categorized into general taxonomies of semantic relatedness. A coordinate relationship is the most common type, followed by association, and contrastive is the least common type. These findings show that two lexical items are related by sharing a number of semantic features or sharing values on these features to the same level of specificity in the context. Lexical errors in Mandarin confirm some general findings in other relevant cross-linguistic studies, suggesting that the semantic links between two lemmas in the lexicon have caused the error. The error distributions in the Mandarin corpus suggest that lexical selection occurs independently in models of lexical production. The data confirm the description of the formulation stage in the context of psycholinguistic models of sentence production (Garrett, 1975, 1982, 1984; Levelt, 1989; Dell, 1986, 1988).

本篇研究主要是從語誤語料庫來探討中文詞彙置換的語意關係。從中文詞彙語誤的語意代換中可以大致上證實英語及德語的現象，由此可見跨語言間相似的情形。這其中的相似之處在於詞彙置換語誤通常是與語意的關連度有關。目標與語誤詞彙（target-error words）之間會有相似的語意特徵或者呈現語意學裡分類架構中的關聯性。從五種分類架構中來看，語意並列（coordinate）是最常見的情況，再來就是關聯性（association），對比關係（contrastive）則是最少見的。這樣的研究結果支持了對於兩個詞彙互相置換時，彼此都有一定程度上相似的語意特徵或是共同擁有在情境上的某些特質的證論。中文裡的詞彙錯誤總體來說與國外一些跨語言研究中所得到的結論大致吻合。也就是說，詞彙裡的兩個詞目（lemma）之間的語意關聯即是構成置換錯誤的主因。從中文語誤語料的分布類別可以清楚的看出心理語言學及神經語言學在語言產製時直接及透明的歷程，與詞彙選擇呈現獨立進行的過程。