| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 華語文教學研究所 === 99 === This study is based on Academia Sinica corpus and uses “Chinese Word Sketch” to find out differences of the Mandarin near synonym—yinqi, zaocheng, daozhi (similar to English ‘cause’) in terms of their basic meanings, syntactic functions, and the collocations. The results of this study can be applied to teaching learners Mandarin Chinese as their second/foreign language, and reduce their difficulties in learning and using near synonyms.
The results are as follows. First, the three words all denote that the pre-mentioned event leads to the after-mentioned event. However, they differ in the syntactic functions and referential event. Second, regarding the syntactic functions, yinqi, zaocheng, and daozhi can act as predicates; only yinqi can merely be followed by a verb with a noun, zaocheng is followed by a verb with a sentential object, and daozhi is followed by a verb with a verbal object. The most remarkable collocating word with yinqi is zhuyi (‘attention’), and the most remarkable collocating word with zaocheng is kunrao (‘trouble’). As for daozhi, there is no remarkable collocating word. In addition, the verbs of zaocheng and daozhi convey negative or passive concepts, and they only differ in the number of arguments.
Finally, regarding the referential event, the after-mentioned event of yinqi is a new one. The event following zaocheng contains the outcome resulted from the pre-mentioned event. A sentence containing zaocheng is a complex sentence consisting of a series of causal-events. The sentence is complete as soon as the event following zaocheng appears. As for daozhi, the after-mentioned event is also causal with the pre-mentioned event, but the pre-mentioned event often appears in form of a complex one. In fact, yinqi, zaocheng, and daozhi vary slightly in the distribution of different types: daozhi is seldom used in conversation, and its usage frequency is apparently higher than zaocheng and daozhi in news coverage. Based on the results, some pedagogical implications and suggestions are made.
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