Gain-framed Buying or Loss-framed Selling? The Analysis of Near Synonyms in Mandarin in Prospect Theory

Gain-framed Buying or Loss-framed Selling? The Analysis of Near Synonyms in Mandarin in Prospect Theory Xin Luo Dept of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University xin-tracy.luo@connect.polyu.hk Chu-Ren Huang Dept of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Abstract While prospect theory (Kahneman and Tver- sky, 1979) has been widely used as a de- scriptive theory to explain various phenom- ena such as insurance and the relation be- tween spending and saving, no studies have been found to look at prospect theory from linguistic prospective to investigate near syn- onymous verbs. This study investigates near- synonymous verbs in Mandarin Chinese under the framework of prospect theory. Using the large-scale Gigaword2 Corpus, we examined how verbal transaction reflects gain and loss frame in terms of human decision. It is observed that mai3 ‘buy’, mai4 ‘sell’ and zu1 ‘rent’ have default gain-loss frame en- coded in the lexical meaning. Because of the topic-prominent typological feature of Man- darin, gain and loss frame have close relation with information structure. By using high- lighting and omission of argument, the gain- loss frame can be emphasized. Our current study focuses on near synonymous verbs in Mandarin Chinese. It is hoped that more near synonymous verbs in Mandarin Chinese and in other languages can be investigated under the framework of prospect theory. 1 Introduction According to Cruse (2022; 1986), near-synonyms can be defined as words that one or more of their senses have a sufficiently close similarity. In Chi- nese, mai3 ‘buy’ and mai4 ‘sell’ is one of the op- posites pairs in Ding (2018)’s analysis of the large- scale corpus-based study on comparing the semantic use. In fact, extensive research have shown the se- mantic difference of the pair of ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ in English. They can be considered to be synonym or directional opposites because they can be expressed in two ways: A buys something from B or B sells something to A (Lyons, 1977). Cruse (2000) pro- posed that ’buy’ and ’sell’ may be four-place con- verses as the relational predicate they denote can have 4 arguments: John sold the car to Bill for £5,000. Bill bought the car from John for £5,000. Mai3 ‘buy’, mai4 ‘sell’ and zu1 ‘rent’, actually have the same eventive structure involving move- ment of money and merchandise. So far, however, no research has been found that investigate near syn- onymous verbs in the domain of gain-loss framing, especially based on natural language data in corpus. Stemmed by Bernoulli (1954), expected utility is used as a criterion to explain the choice between gambles. This work was further developed into a descriptive theory of choice called prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) to evaluate the de- cision making under risk. Under this framework, it is observed that people tend to risk-averse with re- spect to gain and risk-seeking with respect to loss in different domains including financial decision and risky gambles. For example, the computerised lab- oratory experiments conducted by Powell and An- sic …

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