ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that methods of linguistic inquiry in the study of lexical semantics (word meaning) may be fruitfully employed in vocabulary instruction for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), especially at the advanced level. As foreign-language proficiency increases, the vocabulary learning task also grows in both size and complexity, partly reflected in the increasing number of near-synonyms students may encounter. I present three ways of teasing apart near-synonyms. First, near-synonyms with different grammatical properties may be distinguished through their syntactic distribution. Second, near-synonyms that do not differ in syntactic distribution require examples that precisely pinpoint their differences in conceptual or connotative meanings. Third, I propose to distinguish near-synonyms that appear distributionally interchangeable by using a gradient interpretation of what constitutes the core sense of each member in a synonym pair. That is, while both members of a synonym pair may occur in the same collocation contexts, one can usually be shown to be more compatible with some contexts than the other. Further, the chapter demonstrates the use of (i) negative examples (i.e. ungrammatical sentences) that illustrate how not to use a lexical item; and (ii) frequency data using online corpora to strengthen the instructor’s intuitions and to convey these intuitions more vividly to students.
