Corpus-Based Statistical Analysis of Polysemous Words in Legislative Chinese and General Chinese

Abstract

Legislative language is an effective carrier of legal and judicial justice. It has many characteristics that are different from general language. However, currently the study of the language of legislation, especially legislative Chinese, is still relatively weak. This paper extracts high-frequency words from a legislative Chinese corpus and annotates their word meaning in this corpus. By taking them as target words, this paper then randomly extracts sentences from a large-scale general Chinese corpus (the CCL corpus or the corpus of National Language Committee) for word sense annotation. By comparing word meanings in legislative Chinese and general Chinese, this study finds that there are significant differences between them in terms of the total number of meanings and the frequency of meanings. The reasons of the differences are closely related to the accuracy, written style and contextual features of legislative Chinese in comparison with general Chinese. The comparative study between the two types of languages is helpful for exploring the characteristics of polysemous words in legislative Chinese, deepening the teaching and research of legislative Chinese, and providing references for lexical research in legislative Chinese.