Exploring Chinese Verbal Lexicon Developmental Trend with Semantic Space

Exploring Chinese Verbal Lexicon Developmental Trend with Semantic Space Ching-Fen Pan a Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, No. 162, Sec. 1, HePing East Road, Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C. 106 debbychingxp@hotmail.com Abstract. This study assesses the influence of semantic space on the acquisition of verbal lexicon. The studied one hundred and fifty action verbs extracted from the experimental data in M3 project are classified into clusters in terms of meaning specificity. The semantic space variation of different clusters is examined in the distributional model based on Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus (ASBC) with Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). With semantic distance measured in the distributional model, this survey captures the homogeneity of verbs within the cluster and reveals the heterogeneity between the clusters. We compare the semantic space variation to the age-related changes in verb style, and explore the potential influence of word space on verbal lexicon acquisition. Keywords: Mandarin verbs, semantic space, latent semantic analysis 1 Introduction and Motivation The investigations of the semantic flexibility (Duvignau et al., 2005) in verbal lexicon between children and adults in the M31 project motivate and facilitate this study. The purpose of M3 project is to show the importance of semantic verbal approximations in both French and Chinese mandarin early lexicon acquisition. According to Duvignau’s (2005) work, the nature of flexibility can be shown in the use of words and their representation of meanings. This is strongly supported by the evidence of metaphorical utterances, especially nominal metaphorical expressions. In additional to concerning the nominal lexicon, Lordat research laboratory at the University of Toulouse, in France, has shed light on the metaphorical utterances based on verbal lexicon. It has been pointed out that children will try to make an analogy to a previous event and apply the learned verb to the current event because of the lack of a conventional verb to describe the current event. Such usage should be rather considered in terms of semantic approximations, an attempt to utter with the conventional verb due to the semantic cognitive flexibility. From this kind of utterances expressed by children, one can test the semantic flexibility of each verb and semantic proximity among various verbs. The studied 150 verbs2 in this paper are single verbs selected from the experimental data of M3. In the experimental procedure, all of the subjects were asked to describe orally each of the action films. In each film, there appearing a woman who picks up an object and performs specific actions. The scenery remains the same but object and action change each time. Verbal utterances Copyright 2010 by Ching-Fen Pan 1 Model and Measurement of Meaning: A Cross-lingual and Multi-disciplinary Approach of French and Mandarin Verbs based on Distance in Paradigmatic Graphs. Project website: http://140.112.147.149:81/m3/ 2 In the previous study of classification, these 150 verbs are manually tagged as G or S (G:generic versus S:specific). There are 78 G verbs and 45 S verbs, along with 27 U(undetermined) verbs. It is noticeable that U verbs do not count as one type of …

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