讲座题目：A Comparative Study of Vocabulary Sizes in English and Chinese

讲 座 人：端木三、戴雪婵

时   间：2022年 4月21日（周四） 20：00-22：00

讲座地点：腾讯会议（会议号码：565-915-193）

讲座人简介：

San Duanmu (端木三) is Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 1990 and has held teaching posts at Fudan University, Shanghai (1981-1986) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991-present). His research focuses on general properties of language, especially those in phonology.

Xuechan Dai (戴雪婵) is Master student in School of Education, University of Michigan. She finished her bachelor’s degree in Beijing Language and Culture University in 2021. Her area of interest is linguistics, especially in teaching Chinese as a second language, first language acquisition and second language acquisition.

讲座内容简介：

According to 李赋宁 (1991), the vocabulary of modern English contains at least 1,000,000 words, which is many times larger than that in Chinese. Other Chinese scholars have expressed a similar view, such as 汪榕培 (1997), 蔡基刚 (2008), and 潘文国 (2010). However, none of them offered a definition of what a word is, nor explained how they would count words in a dictionary. In this study, we discuss how to count words in English and Chinese, using the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2022) and 《现代汉语词典》 (2016 第七版) as examples. We compare vocabulary sizes in three ways: the number of all entries, the number of single-word entries, and the number of morphemes. We show that Webster indeed has many times more entries, as previous scholars have noted, but most extra entries are composite (made of two or more parts) and are semantically transparent (such as ‘anti-reform’ 反改革), which other dictionaries typically do not collect. If we exclude such entries, which Chinese can easily express, the difference in vocabulary sizes are much smaller than previously assumed. If we compare the sizes of morpheme inventories, Chinese and English are in fact quite similar.