近義詞「Steady」與「Stable」之辨析

Near-Synonyms“Steady”and“Stable”

本研究透過語料庫考察steady 與stable 詞頻與搭配詞分佈情形，接著用詞典義進行語料標記，結果顯示stable獨有詞義為【保持同樣原子結構或化學狀態】，而steady 獨有詞義為【規律持續發展或進行】，另得出兩者共有詞義為【不易變動】、【情緒不易起伏】、【可靠】。
語料庫研究結果呈現兩者共有詞義皆能修飾搭配詞為「與人相關」之詞彙，因此本研究進一步採用Pustejovsky（1991）生成詞庫理論（Generative Lexicon）中的物性結構概念（qualia structure）設計問卷以調查英語母語者與華語為母語的英語學習者在選用steady 與stable 時是否會受不同「與人相關」的搭配詞影響。研究結果顯示stable 傾向描述搭配詞的「形式性角色」，而steady 則傾向描述「主事性角色」（形式性角色表達物件在一個更大的概念域中得以被區分開來的特性；主事性角色表達出物件的起源）；句型方面的結果則呈現steady 較容易出現在限定句型（attributive）。

‘Steady’ and ‘stable’ are both polysemous, which means both have different senses. Yet, people tend to activate their shared senses, making them a pair of near-synonyms. In addition, both adjectives have similar grammatical features, which makes it difficult to distinguish between them. However, there is no research on this pair of near-synonyms. To fill the gap, this present research aims to analyze the two near-synonyms so as: 1) to help non-native speakers of English have a better understanding of these two words; and 2) to postulate a compositional semantic view of near-synonyms.
The present research first classified the senses of stable and steady from online dictionaries and compared their senses. We then investigated their co-occurrence in a corpus. The result of the corpus research indicated that the stable-only sense is ‘remain in the same chemical or atomic state’, and the steady-only sense is ‘continuing or developing gradually or without stopping’. The shared senses of stable and steady are (a) ‘not likely to change’, (b) ‘sensible, reliable, dependable’, and (c) ‘calm’. To know if there are other unstated differences between stable and steady within the three senses, the present research then designed a questionnaire based on these three senses. All three shared senses could be used to describe a person’s traits, so the questionnaire only selected words referring to a person to be the collocation words in the sentences. Our research then applied Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory (1991) to the analysis to observe the interaction between the two adjectives and the modified collocations within predicative and attributive sentence structures. The results showed that ‘stable’ tends to describe the FORMAL quale of the collocation words, while ‘steady’ presents the meanings related to the AGENTIVE quale of the words (the FORMAL quale distinguishes the object within a larger domain; the AGENTIVE quale refers to the origin of an object or how it’s created), and steady is more often used in attributive sentence structures.