Recognition of Disyllabic Intransitive Verbs and Study on Disyllabic Intransitive Verbs Taking Objects Based on Structure Retrieval

Abstract

Verb-object constructions have always been the focus of Chinese grammar research. In Chinese, it has been agreed that transitive verbs take objects, while intransitive verbs taking objects are often confusing. There are very few studies addressing intransitive verbs taking objects. In particular, no investigations have been carried out on the quantitative analysis of the ability of disyllabic intransitive verbs taking objects of different structures and object semantics. Therefore, this study focused on the phenomenon of disyllabic intransitive verbs taking objects and made use of large-scale corpus to investigate the disyllabic intransitive verbs and their objects in order to enrich the understanding of unconventional verb-object constructions in the language. It first proposed a semantic role classification system on the basis of previous studies, and defined the word structure types, as the basis for judging the verb structure types and object semantic types in intransitive verb with object structure. Based on the BCC corpus, this study analyzed the top 4237 high-frequency disyllabic verbs in the fifth edition of Modern Chinese Dictionary. It used structure retrieval to complete the recognition of intransitive verb and its object acquisition, and artificially identified the verb structure types and object semantic roles. It was found that verb-object intransitive verbs have the strongest ability to take objects and the role of “quantity” is the semantic role that most often serves as the object of disyllabic intransitive verbs.