Study of Near Synonymous Mental-State Verbs: A MARVS Perspective

Study of Near Synonymous Mental-State Verbs: A MARVS Perspective Yuan Tao1,2 1. Dalian University of Technology / No. 2 Linggong Road, Ganjingzi District, Dalian taoyuan@dlut.edu.cn 2. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University / Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong yuann.tao@connect.polyu.hk Abstract Near synonym has become a central issue for lexicon and semantics for the nuances in meaning, distribution and context. This study, drawing upon the MARVS frame- work of Huang et al. (2000) and Chang et al. (2000), aims to carry out the de- scriptive lexical-semantic analysis, elabo- rate the similarities and differences and investigate the factors influencing the dis- crepancy of the near synonyms. A mixed method of quantitative and qualitative analysis was used to identify the sense, role module and event module. The findings show that the near synonyms of mental- state verbs vary in frequency, role mod- ule and role internal attribution and indi- cate that there is a positive relationship between event structure modules and the senses. The study should, therefore, be of value to theoretical, pragmatical and peda- gogical implication to a better understand- ing for the mental state verbs as well as the nature of the cognition. 1 Introduction Near-synonym, or the paired-off signifiers, is an increasingly important area in linguistics. Because perfect or full synonyms do not ex- ist logically (van Orman Quine, 1987), syn- onyms present subtle nuances, which is consid- ered a “deviation from the one form-one mean- ing relation” (Taylor, 2003). Mental state verbs (MSVs), also known as psych-verbs or cognitive verbs such as remember, think and recall, are defined as the “internal state lexicon” (Booth and Hall, 2000). Extensive research has distin- guished the difference of near synonyms, partic- ularly action or transitional verbs from the per- spective of collocation, distribution and corpus- based studies (Lee and Liu, 2009; Hong, 2014) and shown the acquisition and production of cognitive verbs in children and the understand- ing of the polysemous meanings (e.g., Booth et al., 1997; Nixon, 2005). However, little is known about near synonyms of mental state verbs. Consequently, what is not clear is the fine-grained distinction between near synonyms of mental state verbs. Hall et al. (1987) suggest that cognitive words may be “central to accessing, monitoring and transforming internal states”. Fetzer (2008) notes that cognitive verbs are applied in “a strategic manner”. The analysis of the near- synonyms of mental state verbs plays a crucial role in the study of meta-cognition and cognitive states. It is therefore important to investigate the mental state verbs, especially the near syn- onymous mental-state verbs for the understand- ing of metacognition. As a theory analyzing the verbal seman- tics based on Mandarin Chinese database, the Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Se- mantics (MARVS) is fast becoming a key in- strument in the comparison of near synonyms. There are a number of studies that apply MARVS to the analysis of transitive verbs (e.g., Ahrens et al., 2003; Hong et al., 2008; Hong et al., 2012), from the perspective of MARVS. Following the framework of Huang …

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