The Polysemy of Da3: An ontology-based lexical semantic study

The Polysemy of Da3: An ontology-based lexical semantic study* Hong, Jia-Fei a, Chu-Ren Huang b, Kathleen Ahrens a, a National Taiwan University, Graduate Institute of Linguistics No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road 106, Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C b Institute of Linguistics Academia Sinica No. 128, Section 2, Academia Road 115, Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C {jiafei, churen}@gate.sinica.edu.tw, kathleenahrens@yahoo.com Abstract. In this study, we explore the polysemy of da3 through the ontological conceptual structure found in SUMO. First, we divide several different senses for da3, clustering physical event senses and metaphorical event senses. In here, we only focus on physical event senses of da3. From the physical event senses of da3, we divide them into two main categories: 1) hit and 2) pump. We then use SUMO ontological concepts to identify these physical senses. Finally, we can observe the common patterns of the “hit” sense group and the “pump” sense group for da3. Keywords: da3, Polysemy, ontology, lexical semantics 1. Introduction In this study, we explore all possible concepts for physical event senses of da3 through the SUMO ontological concept system (Huang et al. 2004). According to previous work (Gao 2001), da3 is a basic verb in the large domain of physical action verbs in Chinese, as 1) it refers to the most basic action of the hand; and 2) at the same time it can refer to a wide-range of actions or events that involve physical contact of one kind or another. We will compare her analysis with the analysis we provide based on SUMO. First, we collect our data from Sinica Corpus and check their senses from Chinese Wordnet. Next, we take these physical event senses of da3 into SUMO concept system (Huang et al. 2004) to find all possible concepts and distinguish them into different categories. Finally, we analyzed these concepts for semantic features which can help us to compare our analysis with the analysis in Gao’s study (2001). 2. Previous research Regarding verb studies, previous research has focused on VV compound verbs in Modern Chinese (Hong and Huang, 2004), or on near synonyms in Modern Chinese (Chief et al, 2000; Huang et al. 2000; Liu 2002; Tsai, 2002; Huang and Hong, 2005). Also, some scholars have worked on da3 polysemy analyses. Da3 is one if the most frequently used verbs, being ranked 16 in the list of most frequently used verbs in Chinese (Bei and Zhang, 1988). Specifically, Gao * Copyright 2007 by Hong, Jia-Fei, Chu-Ren Huang , Kathleen Ahrens 155 (2001) explored the semantic properties of da3 and its prototypical meaning and categorized its semantic representations to show the systematic patterning of its meaning extensions. 3. Motivation and Goals Language knowledge representation is a manifestation of the systematic contrasts found in human communication, which defies conventional description. Take modal verbs as examples. Modal verbs have similar semantic functions and cannot be easily distinguished in terms of their lexical senses. Therefore, they are considered to be interchangeable. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon that this kind of polysemy always has contrasts …

Content truncated to 500 words