Syntactic and Semantic Discrepancies among the Verbs for ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai

Syntactic and Semantic Discrepancies among the Verbs for ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai ∗ Kingkarn Thepkanjana a and Satoshi Uehara b aDepartment of Linguistics, Chulalongkorn University Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330, Thailand Kingkarn.T@chula.ac.th bCenter for the Advancement of Higher Education, & Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8576, Japan uehara@intcul.tohoku.ac.jp Abstract. This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dead, and (ฺB) X kill Y but Y not die. The different syntactic properties among these verbs suggest that the verbs for ‘kill’ in the three languages are not completely semantically equivalent. It is found that the resulting dead event of kill in English is lexically entailed but that of shā in Chinese is merely implied. Thai is a more complicated case. The verbs for ‘kill’ in the three languages are thus classified into different categories based on their syntactic and semantic properties. Keywords: accomplishment verb, activity verb, entailed-result verb, implied-result verb. ∗ This research was supported by a research grant from the National Research Council of Thailand (No.GRB BSS 31532201) and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (No. 20520347). Copyright 2010 by Kingkarn Thepkanjana and Satoshi Uehara PACLIC 24 Proceedings 291 1 Introduction The verb meaning ‘kill’ denotes one of the most basic and common actions in any language. Semantically, there are two components in an action of killing, namely, an unspecified causing action and a resulting change to the dead state of an affected entity. These facts might lead us to believe that the verbs for ‘kill’ across languages have complete semantic equivalence. This paper aims to point out that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among the verbs for ‘kill’ in some languages. The languages that are chosen as a case study to illustrate the discrepancies are English, Chinese and Thai. The verb glossed as ‘kill’ in any language is typically encoded as a transitive verb taking an agent and a patient. The verb kill in English is generally categorized in two ways, i.e. a lexical causative verb and an accomplishment verb. Thepkanjana (2000) claims that lexical causatives express prototypical causation in Lakoff’s sense, in which an agentive participant volitionally and directly transfers physical energy onto the second participant (Lakoff, 1987). The second participant undergoes a change of state as a result of the agent’s action. A lexical causative thus consists of two major subevents: the agent’s activity and the patient’s change of state. Given the four event types postulated by Vendler, namely, activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state, the verb kill in English can be categorized as an accomplishment verb (Vendler, 1967). An accomplishment refers to a process going …

Content truncated to 500 words