arXiv Computation and Language By Chaoyi Wu, Yu-Hsiang Tseng, R. Harald Baayen

Reduplicative constructions in Mandarin: Socio-emotional profiling through distributional semantics

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The paper investigates Mandarin Chinese reduplicative constructions that repeat two-character base words or their constituents, such as expressions meaning ‘in good health’ or ‘discuss a bit’. Using Tencent word embeddings, the study demonstrates that distributional semantics can recover known semantic and grammatical properties of these reduplications, revealing clear semantic and pragmatic differentiation between the two patterns. Procrustes analysis shows that the overall organization of the base-word space is largely preserved in the reduplication space, with local mismatches indicating discourse-pragmatic reorganization.

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