Compositional Operations of Mandarin Chinese Perception Verb “kàn”: A Generative Lexicon Approach

Compositional Operations of Mandarin Chinese Perception Verb “kàn”: A Generative Lexicon Approach∗ Shan WANG, Chu-Ren HUANG Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University wang.shan@polyu.edu.hk, churen.huang@inet.polyu.edu.hk Abstract. The compositional operation of a predicate can be very complex. This paper captures a full picture of such an operation through investigating genuine corpus data of Chinese perception verb “看” (kàn, look at). The study reveals that context and qualia structure can affect the meaning of verb-argument composition of “kàn”. It also shows that the compositional ability of “kàn” varies under different senses, and each sense has its own type selection preference. Keywords: kàn, selection, accommodation, exploitation, introduction 1 Introduction Distributional information based on distributional analysis is widely used in many natural language processing tasks. However, distributional analysis does not emphasize enough on the semantic compositional manipulation of the word within context. In view of this, (Pustejovsky, 2006; Pustejovsky & Jezek, 2008) thus focused on domain-preserving shifting within the entity domain, and predicted the operations shown in Table 1. Table 1: Verb-Argument Composition Argument is Verb selects Natural Artifactual Complex Natural Selection/Accommodation Qualia Introduction Dot Introduction Artifactual Accommodation Selection/Accommodation Dot Introduction Complex Dot Exploitation Dot Exploitation Selection/ Accommodation Nevertheless, (Pustejovsky & Jezek, 2008) found from the corpus that listen can be combined with strikingly different kinds of arguments and it is hard to map them to the verb-argument composition slots listed in Table 1. They also pointed out that the type system and the compositional operations are more complex than that illustrated in the above table. In this study, we will try to capture a full picture of the interaction between types and compositional operations of Mandarin Chinese perception verb “kàn” (look at) by analyzing corpus data. (Huang & Hong, 2005) and (Zhung, 2002) are two of the most related works to “kàn”. To be more specific, (Huang & Hong, 2005) revealed that in the visual sense, “kàn” is an active extension of observation, while “jiàn” (see) is a passive cognition of introspection. Also, ∗ The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer and Prof. Jian-hua Hu for their constructive comments on this paper. Copyright 2010 by Shan WANG and Chu-Ren HUANG PACLIC 24 Proceedings 707 (Zhung, 2002) classified the meaning extension of “kàn” into physical, mingle and mental categories; and all of which are derived out of the interaction of metaphor and metonymy. However, no formal theory was used in these two studies to test the compositional mechanism of Chinese data. Therefore, this paper will explore the compositional operation of different senses of “kàn”, and capture the characteristics of such operations within the frame of the generative lexicon. The following sections are organized as follows. We first introduce the theoretical basis in Section 2. The compositional operation of different senses of “kàn” is then explored next in Section 3. Afterwards, Section 4 explains the factors that affect the meaning of verb-argument composition of “kàn”, and Section 5 explores the characteristics of the compositional mechanism of “kàn” . Finally, …

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