Verbal Semantics as Eventive Information: The Case of Verb “制服” and “制約” in Chinese Gigaword Corpus

Verbal Semantics as Eventive Information: The Case of Verb “制服” and “制約” in Chinese Gigaword Corpus Abstract. Using Chinese Gigaword Corpus, this study aims to explore the similarities and differences between two Chinese verbs “制服” (zhì fú) and “制 約” (zhì yuē), so as to understand the lexicosemantics of verbs with and without an endpoint. First, the distributional patterns show that the two verbs occur mainly in the genre of story of journalism (98.4% for “制服” zhì fú and 99.1% for “制約”). Second, based on the MARVS theory and the collocations with the tense and aspect markers (“著” zhe、“了” liǎo、“過” guò), it is found that “制 服” is telic (accomplishment), representing an event module with an endpoint, that is BOUNDARY (.), while “制約” is atelic and a PROCESS activity (///). Third, in contrast to the uni-directional verb“制服”, it is found that “制約” can be framed bi-directionally between the agent and the patient, using the adverbals such as “相互” (xiāng hù) and “互相” (hù xiāng). As a continuous PROCESS verb, “制約” can be modified by: a) degree adverbials such as “嚴重” (yán zhòng), b) duration /continuous adverbials such as“一直”(yī zhí)、“繼續” (jì xù), and c) starting-relevant adverbials such as “開始”(kāi shǐ)。The study sheds light on teaching and learning verb meanings through lexicosemantics in context, particularly the event features suggested by the MARVS theory. Keywords: corpus linguistics, semantics, tense and aspects, MARVS, coercion 1 Introduction Understanding how meaning is conveyed in and transmitted through language is an important task for language learners. Researchers try to decode sense and meaning from a variety of perspectives, including for example, syntactically (Chomsky, 1965), innately (Pinker, 2003), and statistically (Ellis, 2002). With the development of computers and internet, data are accumulated at an incredibly fast speed. We now can easily access to large language database (corpora), and many of which are annotated with useful part-of-speech tagging, making corpus-based analysis for understanding patterns of sense and meaning feasible. This study reports a corpus-based analysis, using a tagged corpus and a Sketch Engine called Chinese Gigaword, consisting of about 600 million words from traditional and simplified Chinese news media (Huang, 1996; Kilgarriff et al., 2005). 1.1 Verb sense and meaning Verbs and nouns are the two basic elements in a language that help us experience and express the world. Nouns stand for entity as they often prime concrete objects and verbs represent event and state. Verbs are eventual so that sense of verb meaning can be determined by the event kind and formed through its conceptualization in context (Huang et al. 2000). Such a conceptualization regarding the lexicosemantic relations of verbs and their meaning can be understood from Fillmore’s (1982, 2008) frame theory and Goldberg’s (1995, 2003) Caused-Motion Construction theory, concerning the thematic relations of agents, patients, themes as well as the placement of verbs in the “construction grammar”. In addition to the constructional grammar approaches (e.g., the application of FrameNet, Fillmore & Baker, 2000), the theory of Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) provides a perspective for understanding …

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