Alternation Across Semantic Fields : A Study of Mandarin Verbs of Emotion

Alternation Across Semantic Fields: A Study of Mandarin Verbs of Emotion Li-li Chang*, Keh-jiann Chen*, Chu-Ren Huang** *Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica **Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica Abstract In this paper we will explore the consistent contrast between VV-compounds and non-W- compounds across seven subgroups of verbs of emotion. The distinctive syntactic features for the contrast include the distribution of the grammatical functions, the cooccrrence restrictions with head nouns and head verbs, the compatibilities with the imperative and evaluative constructions, the aspect, and the transitivity. We conclude that the contrast is motivated by event structure properties. To describe a state-type event, the speaker could choose to focus on the inchoative stage or the homogeneous stage of the event. In addition, since VV compounding has the function of type-lifting an event to a referential term, or to refer to its generic properties, it is natural to predict that VV compounding is a predominant source for the verbs of indicating homogeneity. 1. Introduction Many recent linguistic studies explored how lexical meaning predicts syntactic regularities (Levin 1993, Pustejovsky 1995). One important approach is to study the contrasts in near synonym pairs to identify the minimal semantic attributes that motivate the contrasts (Tsai et al 1998, Liu et al 1997 & 1998). In this current study, we extend the range of the study to a semantic field, which contains more than one synonym pairs. Thus we can attest to the primary status of the proposed semantic attributes by showing that the generalization can be extended to the other synonym pairs in the same semantic field. Tsai et al (1998) discussed the contrast between the synonym pair KUAILE� and GAOXING AR, and based on their findings we re-examine the contrast in a broader range, i.e. the verbs of emotion. We have four results from this study: 1) we find that the contrast is not specific to KUAILE and GAOXING, but to the whole semantic field of verbs of emotion; 2) we define the contrast more precisely; 3) we can trace the cause of the contrast; and 4) we can identify the influence of the compound structure. In this paper we will examine seven types of emotion verbs, i.e. happy, depressed, sad, regret, angry, afraid and worried. All the observations and statistics in this paper are based on "Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Mandarin Chinese" (abbreviated as "Sinica Corpus" in the following texts), which is a tagged Mandarin corpus containing a total of five million words (CKIP 1995). We consider only the verbs with a frequency of over 40 in Sinica Corpus. The verbs under examination in the paper are listed in Table 1. There're totally 33 verbs. Four of them are monosyllabic and 29 of them are disyllabic. Subtype Verbs and the frequency in Sinica Corpus Happy KUAILE VM(942), GAOXING A ::i (669), YUKUAI SM271), LE M(264), XIYUE 4t(156), KAIXIN PliCA152), HUANLE RV(141), HUANXI R4 (107), KUAIHUO tAA(48), TONGKUAI iffitA(40) Depressed TONGKU r*--A--(443), TONG 6(281), NANGUO --ui A(232), CHENZHONG it -W(83), JUSANG gf..,:k(62), …

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