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Entrenchment and Creativity in Chinese Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10709))

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Abstract

This paper aims to explore a special type of idiomatic expressions of even length called Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs) in Chinese, and explain their variations with reference to semantic and structural constraints on the elements imposed by the construction of QIEs on the one hand, and its interplay with individual semantic elements in semantic space in the comprehension task of QIEs variants. Results of human ratings and behavioral experiment both show that semantic distance affects the speed of comprehension with the construction entrenchment. For those QIEs with idiomaticity, semantic distance leads to no major effect. We show that Chinese QIEs provide an ideal testing ground for the empirical investigation of the functional linguistic notion of entrenchment in processing multi-morphemic strings.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Shu-Kai Hsieh, Chiung-Yu Chiang, Bo-Ya Wang, Tai-Li Chou & Chia-Lin Lee

  2. Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yu-Hsiang Tseng, Tai-Li Chou & Chia-Lin Lee

Authors
  1. Shu-Kai Hsieh
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  2. Chiung-Yu Chiang
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  3. Yu-Hsiang Tseng
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  4. Bo-Ya Wang
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  5. Tai-Li Chou
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  6. Chia-Lin Lee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shu-Kai Hsieh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Peking University , Beijing, China

    Yunfang Wu

  2. National Taiwan Normal University , Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  3. Peking University , Beijing, China

    Qi Su

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Hsieh, SK., Chiang, CY., Tseng, YH., Wang, BY., Chou, TL., Lee, CL. (2018). Entrenchment and Creativity in Chinese Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions. In: Wu, Y., Hong, JF., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10709. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73573-3_52

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73573-3_52

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73572-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73573-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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