From Near-synonyms to Divergent Viewpoint Foci: A Corpus-based MARVS Driven Account of Two Verbs of Attention

From Near-synonyms to Divergent Viewpoint Foci: A Corpus-based MARVS driven account of two verbs of attention Ziqian Wang1,2, Chu-Ren Huang2 1Research Center for Foreign Language Education and Teacher Development, Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai), Tangjia, Zhuhai, China ziqian2.wang@connect.polyu.hk 2 Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kow- loon, Hong Kong SAR, China churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Abstract This study attempted to construct the semantic rep- resentation of the two near-synonyms of attention, zhu4yi4 and zhuan1xin1, based on MARVS theory. Since cross-strait semantic comparison has been an important topic in lexical semantic research, we also provided a fine-grained comparison of their even- tive meanings as well as their usage variations be- tween Mainland and Taiwan. The linguistic patterns were extracted from the one billion-word GigaWord Corpus (2.0) under the interface of the Chinese Word Sketch Engine. We found that zhu4yi4 and zhuan1xin1 differ crucially in the viewpoint focus of the verbal aspect, with zhuan1xin1 focusing on the process while zhu4yi4 focusing on the resultant endpoint. The contrasts can be represented with both event structure and role internal attributes, as supported by different distributional patterns from the corpus. Besides, by shifting viewpoint perspec- tive, we accounted for the salient pattern of ‘zhu4yi4 + gained-end’ in the corpus, which is, comparing with the gain of potential loss, people find it more difficult to deal with the loss of current gain. 1 Introduction The study of near-synonyms has been a very im- portant area in Chinese lexical semantics. It has been argued that the lexical semantic features can determine the syntactic behaviors of verbs (Huang et al., 2000). In this regard, the examination of syn- tactic difference could be an effective way to distin- guish the lexical conceptual profile and role of near- synonyms, which differ from each other only in lim- ited contexts. Since syntactic differences could not be observed by pure intuition, the adoption of cor- pus data and relevant query tool has been proved by a series of study as a promising way to probe into the relation between syntax and semantics in Chi- nese (Huang et al., 2000; Huang and Chung, 2008; Huang et al., 2008). We attempted to give an in-depth examination of the near-synonym pair, i.e. zhuan1xin1 and zhu4yi4 by extracting collocational patterns from the Giga- Word Corpus (2nd version) under the interface of Chinese Word Sketch Engine (CWS). A thorough comparison of the semantic representation of zhuan1xin1 and zhu4yi4 by far have been rarely touched on. Based on the sense inventory of Chi- nese WordNet (CWN), two senses were identified for zhu4yi4: 1. Concentrate one’s will (serve as a transitive verb or noun); 2. Observation with great focus (only serves as a noun). However, no adequate data were found for the sense of zhuan1xin1. A fur- ther check in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (6th edition) reveals that zhuan1xin1 means concen- trating one's attention in order to focus. These lim- ited dictionary explanations tend to suggest that they are near-synonyms, but still far from adequate to explain their …

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