Feasibility of Direct Language Transfer of the Verb “to Eat” from Cantonese to Mandarin

Ka Hang Leung*, Jia Fei Hong

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The verb “to eat” is commonly used in both Cantonese and Mandarin. According to the analysis result, we can see that the most frequently occurring senses of the verb in both languages are “to ingest”. Even though both Cantonese and Mandarin use the same set of Chinese characters, the verb “to eat” in both languages does not develop into the same set of senses. From the employed dictionaries and corpora, the number of senses of the verb in both languages are 11, while the developed pathways follow the ingestion process. After comparing the similar senses, we found that even for the same senses, the verb “to eat” in a Mandarin sentence cannot be replaced by the Cantonese one directly, while the objects in the sentences of both languages are different due to the lexical difference between the languages. The above analysis provides an insight for designing the Mandarin teaching materials on the verb “to eat” to the native Cantonese students.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationChinese Lexical Semantics - 24th Workshop, CLSW 2023, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsMinghui Dong, Jia-Fei Hong, Jingxia Lin, Peng Jin
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages146-159
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9789819705825
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event24th Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics, CLSW 2023 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 2023 May 192023 May 21

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14514 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference24th Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics, CLSW 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period2023/05/192023/05/21

Keywords

  • Cantonese
  • Language transfer
  • Lexical semantics
  • Mandarin
  • “Eat”

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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