What more can empirical contextual data tell about the real usage of words and collocations? A case study of the qia (sic) cluster with Chinese Gigaword data

This article presents a corpus-based distributional analysis of the usage patterns of a cluster of words and compounds containing the morpheme qia (sic) 'just, exactly', by the aid of an extended concordancer to retrieve representative collocations from their adjacent contexts in Chinese Gigaword. Upon a survey of the historical evolution of the qia cluster with exemplar data and an overview of existing proposals to account for their usages in terms of expectational match, our distributional analysis is conducted to identify the salient collocational or contextual features that lead to a number of interesting findings. Substantial evidences are provided for clarifying the non-word status of qia ru ((sic)(sic)) and qia si ((sic)(sic)) and their similarities, the exchangeability of qiahao ((sic)) and qiaqiao ((sic)), distinct collocational preferences of the adverbs qia (sic), qiaqia ((sic)(sic)) and the others with different subsets of verbs, the prosodic requirement of an even number of syllables for a qia-adverb and its main verb, and the contrastive popularity of qiaqia ((sic)(sic)) vs qiadang ((sic)(sic)) to reveal different usage tendencies between speakers in Taiwan and the Mainland. All these novel findings and insights about the subtle (dis)similarities in the usage and meanings of the qia (sic) cluster suggest that distributional analysis of contextual collocations using large-scale language data remains a powerful tool that can complement other analytical approaches for the advancement of lexical semantic research.