近義詞「steady」與「stable」之辨析

Abstract

在語言學習的過程中，常會遇到的問題就是如何分辨近義詞，由於這些詞彙的詞義相近，常使非母語者無法正確地使用這些詞彙。近義詞steady與stable同為多義詞（polysemy），各具有數個詞義，而兩者共有的詞義卻較為顯著，使人難以區分，且兩者皆為形容詞，語法特性相近，因此辨別兩者詞義與其使用時機，對於非英語母語者來說相當困難，而至今卻未有相關研究，故本研究將補足此缺口針對近義詞組steady與stable進行詞義分析。\n本研究首先彙整steady與stable之辭典義，並透過語料庫考察兩者語料詞頻與搭配詞之分佈情形，接著進一步利用詞典義進行抽樣語料標記，結果顯示stable獨有詞義為【保持同樣原子結構或化學狀態】，而steady獨有詞義則為【規律的持續發展或進行】，另外亦得出兩者共有的詞義為【不易變動】、【情緒不易起伏】、【可靠】。語料庫研究結果呈現兩者共有的詞義皆能修飾搭配詞為「與人相關」之詞彙，因此本研究進一步採用Pustejovsky（1991）提出的生成詞庫理論（Generative Lexicon）中物性結構（qualia structure）概念設計問卷以調查英語母語者與華語為母語的英語學習者在選用steady與stable時是否會受不同「與人相關」的搭配詞影響。研究結果顯示stable傾向描述搭配詞的「形式性角色」，而steady則傾向描述「主事性角色」（形式性角色表達物件在一個更大的概念域中得以被區分開來的特性；主事性角色表達出物件的起源）；句型方面的結果則呈現steady較容易出現在限定句型（attributive）。

In language learning, the problem that learners often encounter is that they cannot tell the differences between two near-synonyms because the differences are subtle.\nSteady and stable are both polysemous, which means both of them have different senses. Yet, people tend to activate their shared senses, making them a pair of near-synonym. In addition, both adjectives have similar grammatical features, which makes them hard to distiguish. However, there is no research on this pair of near-synonyms. To fill the gap, this present research aims to analyze the two near-synonyms so as to help nonnative speakers of English get more understanding of these two words, and to postulate a compositional semantic view of near-synonym.\nThe present research first classified the senses of stable and steady from online dictionaries and compared their senses. We then investigated their co-occurrence in corpus. The result of the corpus research indicated that the stable-only sense is ‘remain in the same chemical or atomic state’, and the steady-only sense is ‘continuing or developing gradually or without stopping’. The shared senses of stable and steady are (a) ‘not likely to change’ (b) ‘sensible reliable, dependable’ (c) ‘calm’. To know if there are other unstated differences between stable and steady within the three senses, the present research then designed a questionnaire based on these three senses. All the three shared senses could be used to describe a person’s traits, so the questionnaire only selected words referring to person to be the collocation words in the sentences. Our research then applied Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory (1991) into the analysis to observe the interaction between the two adjectives and the modified collocations within predicative and attributive sentence structures. The results showed that stable tends to describe the FORMAL quale of the collocation words, while steady presents the meanings related to the AGENTIVE quale of the words (the FORMAL quale distinguishes the object within a larger domain; the AGENTIVE quale refers to the origin of an object or how it’s created), and steady is more often used in attributive sentence structure.