Chinese Verbs Research Articles

Lexicon over Syntax: L2 Structural Processing of Chinese Separable Verbs

This study used online and offline tasks to examine whether proficient Korean learners of Chinese can analyze the syntactic structure of separable verbs in a native-like manner during real-time processing. Separable verbs are considered a unique grammar in Chinese, involving an interface of lexicon and syntax. Despite their lexical status, separable verbs occur in the form of syntactic phrases, with constituents modified by phrase-level rules in syntax. The present study demonstrates that despite native-like offline judgments on the syntactic analysis of separable verbs, the same grammatical information was not utilized in the L2 real-time processing. The results of the experiments indicate that the structural information of separable verbs was employed less in the L2 online processing due to overreliance on the lexical representations of these compounds. In contrast, it was shown that L1 speakers could access both syntactic and lexical information associated with separable verbs during real-time processing. It is suggested that when processing a construction involving an interface of syntax and lexicon, L2 speakers rely heavily on lexicon storage and underutilize structural information.

The C-E Translation Strategies of Verbal Yue in Classical Literature from the Perspective of Relevance Translation Theory

The full text of the Tang Dynasty the Legend of Curly-bearded Man is short and pithy, but the plot is wonderful and full of ups and downs. A large number of dialogues in the text play an extremely important role in promoting the plot of the story and enriching the characters. There is no doubt that verbs will be used in the dialogue of the characters, and the ancient Chinese verb "Yue(曰)" is of high frequency. In the full text of more than 2000 words, there are 52 words "Yue" to start the dialogue and shape the character. Therefore, it is a challenge to deal with the translation of "Yue" in ancient Chinese in different contexts. From the perspective of relevance translation theory, this paper makes a comparative analysis of the translation strategies and expressive effects of the word "Yue" in the English versions of Zhou Jinsong, Wang Jing, Yang Xianyi, and Gladys Yang, as well as Birch's version of Qiu Yan Ke Zhuan, so as to explore the different translation treatments of the same Chinese in different contexts and demonstrate their justifications. It hopes to provide some references for the translation of "Chinese culture going out" and related classics.

The Corresponding Expression of Chinese Directional Verbs in Uyghur Language

Directional verbs have always been a difficult point in teaching, translating and learning Chinese grammar. Scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research on them, but most of them focus only on directional verbs or only on individual words in Chinese-Uyghur directional verbs. There is little systematic and comprehensive research on the corresponding expressions of Chinese-Uyghur directional verbs. Based on previous studies and the theoretical foundation of comparative linguistics, this paper discusses the corresponding expression rules of directional verbs in Uyghur from four aspects: the grammatical meaning of simple directional verbs, compound directional verbs and directional verbs, and the difference between directional verbs and object positions. Through comparative analysis, the structural patterns and rules of different languages will be found, which will provide a certain scientific basis for the learning of Chinese-Uyghur languages and also play a certain auxiliary role in second language teaching.

The creativity and limitations of AI neural machine translation

Abstract This study examines the performance of the neural machine translation system DeepL in translating Shakespeare’s plays Coriolanus and The Merchant of Venice. The aim here is to explore the strengths and limitations of an AI-based English-Chinese translation of literary texts. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the study investigates the accuracy and fluency rates, the linguistic features, and the use of various methods of translation in the Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays conducted via DeepL. It compares these to the translations by Liang Shiqiu, a well-known Chinese translator. The study finds that DeepL performs well in translating these works, with an accuracy and fluency rate of above 80% in sampled texts, showing the potential of the use of neural machine translation in translating literary texts across distant languages. Our research further reveals that the DeepL translations exhibit a certain degree of creativity in their use of translation methods such as addition, explicitation, conversion and shift of perspective, and in the use of Chinese sentence-final modal particles, as well as Chinese modal verbs. On the other hand, the system appears to be limited in that a certain amount of translation errors are present, including literal translations.

A quantitative study of the polysemy of Mandarin Chinese perception verb kàn ‘look/see’

ABSTRACT This study presents a quantitative study of the polysemy of the Chinese perception verb kàn ‘look/see’ by using a corpus-based behavioural profile approach. The analysis yields the following findings. First, two significant meaning clusters of kàn can be distinguished: the first represents physical perceptual senses, and the second groups together cognitive senses. Second, both the frequency and behavioural profiles are used to determine the prototypicality of kàn. They lead to the same conclusion that the sense ‘perceive with eyes’ is the prototypical meaning of kàn. Based on the corpus results, a semantic network of kàn has been proposed and the cognitive mechanisms underlying its meaning extension have been addressed. It is found that its meaning extensions in the domain of physical perception are attributed to the metonymy SUBEVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT, while its meaning extensions in the domain of cognition are ascribed to the metaphor COGNITION IS PERCEPTUAL VISION. These results not only provide usage-based evidence for the universal interconnections between perception and cognition, but also confirm the effectiveness and viability of a behavioural profile analysis in studying the polysemy of perception verbs. This study also demonstrates that quantitative methods are essential for the description and understanding of semasiological structures.

A Comparative Study on the Meaning of ChineseVerbs “ 洗/刷 ” and Korean Verb “ 씻다 ”

Polysemy verbs are common in Chinese and Korean, but this does not mean that corresponding words in the twolanguages possess the exact same meanings. Based on the example sentences in the dictionary and their daily usage, thispaper makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in the basic meanings, extended meanings, andspecific usage between the Chinese verb “洗/刷” and the Korean verb “씻다”. In the basic meaning, “洗/刷” “씻다”share a common meaning of “making dirty things disappear”. However, their extended meanings are quite different, andthere exist complex corresponding relationships between them. In terms of usage, the Chinese word “ 洗 / 刷 ” is mostlyused to express negative emotions. For example, “ 洗 ” has the extended meaning of “robbing or killing” and “ 刷 ” hasthe extended meaning of “eliminating”. In contrast, “ 씻 다 ” is mostly used to express positive emotions and has theintention of “getting rid of injustice, misunderstanding and guilt”. In addition, from the field of their usage, “ 洗 / 刷 ” iswider than “ 씻다 ”, and it is commonly used in the field of science and technology

A Cognitive Semantics Analysis of the Directional Motion Verbs wang往 and lai 来in the YiChing

The Chinese directional motion verbs wang往 and lai来can be glossed in English as ‘go’ and ‘come’, and the distinction between ‘go’ and ‘come’ in English is comparable to that between wang and lai in Chinese. Their usage in the YiChing is described and analyzed in this article. In the YiChing, wang and lai frequently co-occur in the same sentence, as well as occurring singly elsewhere. Based on a corpus analysis of the YiChing, combined with qualitative interpretive analysis, this article proposes that the majority of co-occurring usages of wang and lai are metaphorical. Metaphorical uses can also be found in the single usages of the two verbs. These metaphors are informed by the cultural practices and values that form the context for the YiChing as a cultural artifact as well as a classical text. Further, these directional motion verbs are based on metaphorical extensions that lead to their semantic changes (metaphors are based on the motion). Thus, the article further analyzes the role of metaphor and cultural context in the semantic changes to the directional motion verbs wang and lai.

Structural and semantic features of verbs of interpersonal relations in Russian and Chinese

The subject of the study is the structural and semantic features of verbs expressing interpersonal relationships in two different-structured Russian and Chinese languages. The purpose of the work is to provide a comparative description of the structure of verbs and their semantic features, as well as to identify the specifics of grammatical categories and compare the word-formation types of verbs in two languages. The following methods were used in this article: descriptive method, comparative method and component analysis method. From the point of view of the structural-semantic approach, the verbal vocabulary of the Russian and Chinese languages expressing interpersonal relations still remains insufficiently studied, so research in the field of verb semantics is relevant. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the fact that for the first time the common and unique features of the analyzed verbs are considered in comparison. It is shown that an important feature of Russian verbs is that they have many forms of word change with different meanings, whereas in Chinese the verb has no forms of word change and semantic diversity. The results of the research can be used in the process of teaching lecture courses on comparative lexicology of Russian and Chinese languages; when reading special courses in cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, intercultural communication. The conclusion of this research is that compared with Russian verbs, which are characterized by a wealth and variety of affixes, Chinese verbs do not have possibilities of word formation for expressing different grammatical meanings. These various structural and semantic features of Russian and Chinese verbs complicate the understanding of the text and create significant difficulties in translation, as well as in the practice of teaching these languages as foreign.

한 중 사동법 대조 연구 - 한국어 어휘적 방법과 중국어 통사적 방법을 중심으로 -

The purpose of this study is to examine the correspondences between the korean lexical causative and the chinese syntactical causative. In the previous Contrastive studies of causatives in Korean and Chinese, the correspondences between the korean lexical causative and the chinese syntactical causative are mainly dealt with, but the research results never coincide and the research based on the chinese causative sentences are not made. In fact, the Chinese syntactical causative verbs have primary verbal meaning beside causativeness, therefore the chinese causative verbs are different from the korean syntactical causative ‘hata’ in ‘-ge hata’. This study re-analyze the issues in the korean causatives and the chinese causatives and contrast the korean lexical causative ‘sikita’ and the chinese causative sentences based on the animacy of causer and causee. In order to examine the correspondence between the korean ‘sikita’ lexical causative and the chinese syntactical causatives, we perform contrastive analysis based on the four animacy type [±animacay] of causer and causee. In conclusion, there is confirmed that the differences of construction but the similarities of meaning between the korean ‘sikita’ lexical causative and the Chinese syntactical causatives.

복합어 構詞의 구조와 의미관계 고찰

The morphemes in a word are related structurally and semantically. This study uses the notion of verbal morpheme, and a verbal morpheme with lexical meaning of cooking is a cooking verbal morpheme. Most Chinese cooking verbs are monosyllabic, consisting of a single verbal morpheme, which has concrete lexical meaning and strong productivity of word formation. The objects of this study are Chinese compound words formed by cooking verbal morphemes. This study aims to investigate the structural and semantic relation of the verbal morphemes, mainly investigating the lexical morphology in a specific word group with the cooking meaning. As a result, in Chinese, the relative compound words are rich in the number and types, and some of them have similar structure with Chinese phrasal structure. As for lexical morphology, the most productive type is modifier-core type. As for the meaning of the components, those with the related relation(关联关系) are the most productive. But original meaning relation(一致关系) is also quite productive. This means participating in word formation while maintaining the conceptual meaning as much as possible rather than the expanding meaning. The core meaning of most compound words are cooking, however, some of the compound words(熬, 涮) choose metaphorical meanings as its core meaning. It is widely used as a metaphor in our life.

Chinese synthetic verbs: a further challenge to manner/result complementarity on the basis of lexical root meaning analysis

Abstract This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation.

Chinese Word Order in the Comparative Sino-Tibetan and Sociotypological Contexts

The present study discusses typology and variation of word order patterns in nominal and verb structures across 20 Chinese languages and compares them with another 43 languages from the Sino-Tibetan family. The methods employed are internal and external historical reconstruction and correlation studies from linguistic typology and sociolinguistics. The results show that the head-final tendency is a baseline across the family, but individual languages differ by the degree of head-initial structures allowed in a language, leading to a hybrid word order profile. On the one hand, Chinese languages consistently manifest the head-final noun phrase structures, whereas head-initial deviants can be explained either internally through reanalysis or externally through contact. On the other hand, Chinese verb phrases have varied toward head-initial structures due to contact with verb-medial languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, before reinstalling the head-final structures as a consequence of contact with verb-final languages in North Asia. When extralinguistic factors are considered, the typological north-south divide of Chinese appears to be geographically consistent and gradable by the latitude of individual Chinese language communities, confirming the validity of a broader typological cline from north to south in Eastern Eurasia.

The Syntactic Derivation of Verb Gapping in Mandarin Chinese

The study discusses the syntactic derivation mechanism of verb gapping in Mandarin Chinese, which exists in the second conjunct of the construction. First, the paper introduces Mandarin Chinese lacks the canonical English-like verb gapping construction based on previous studies, in that verb gapping in Chinese is allowed only in non-generic VPs, may not be paired with an antecedent in the adjacent conjunct, and could appear in a subordinate construction. Second, different from the widely discussed across-the-board (ATB) movement or the VP-ellipsis analysis in the canonical English verb gapping construction, or the verb raising or verb ellipsis in the Chinese verb gapping structure, this study adopts that verb gaps in Mandarin Chinese are actually multiple fragments of the construction. The object-NP in the target gapping clause is proposed to undergo focalization, within the sentential (IP)-internal domain. Following the VP-internal subject hypothesis, the subject-NP then moves from Spec-vP to Spec-IP, motivated by EPP-feature for left peripheries. The remnant constituent vP is hypothesized with deletion at the PF-interface, giving rise to the surface “Subject-NP + Object-NP” order. If the direction of the assumption is acceptable, the proposal of focalization in the sentence-internal domain once again empirically confirms the ‘parallelism’/‘identity’ between multiple fragment clauses in the gapping construction in Mandarin Chinese.

A corpus-driven study of lexicalization models of English intransitive verbs.

This bottom-up study applied a corpus-driven approach to extract the major lexicalization models of English intransitive verbs (EIVs) through an analysis of their meanings under the Ideal Motion Event Category inspired by Talmy. A 710-photo specialized multimodal corpus of EIVs was constructed for this purpose. Data analysis showed that the major lexicalization models of EIVs include [Motion + Patient], [Motion + Manner], [Motion + Path], [Motion + Result], [Motion + Location], and [Motion + Purpose]. In-depth analysis of these models identified three major possible reasons why EIVs cannot originally take direct objects: the incorporation of [Patient], the inheritance of the intransitive feature, and the internalization of the actions expressed by EIVs. By comparing Chinese learners' most misused EIVs with their corresponding Chinese verbs, the current study provides empirical data to illustrate why transitive misusages of EIVs might occur among Chinese learners. The findings of this study will help English learners and users better apply EIVs.

A Chinese verb semantic feature dataset (CVFD).

Language is an advanced cognitive function of humans, and verbs play a crucial role in language. To understand how the human brain represents verbs, it is critical to analyze what knowledge humans have about verbs. Thus, several verb feature datasets have been developed in different languages such as English, Spanish, and German. However, there is still a lack of a dataset of Chinese verbs. In this study, we developed a semantic feature dataset of 1140 Chinese Mandarin verbs (CVFD) with 11 dimensions including verb familiarity, agentive subject, patient, action effector, perceptual modality, instrumentality, emotional valence, action imageability, action complexity, action intensity, and the usage scenario of action. We calculated the semantic features of each verb and the correlation between dimensions. We also compared the difference between action, mental, and other verbs and gave some examples about how to use CVFD to classify verbs according to different dimensions. Finally, we discussed the potential applications of CVFD in the fields of neuroscience, psycholinguistics, cultural differences, and artificial intelligence. All the data can be found at https://osf.io/pv29z/ .

PECULIARITIES OF EXPRESSING SYNTAGMATIC CONSTRUCTIONS WITH THE HELP OF NOUNS, PRONOUNS AND VERBS

This article reveals the features of expressing syntagmatic constructions with the help of nouns, pronouns and verbs in modern Chinese.

英汉移动动词词汇化模式对比研究

英汉移动动词词汇化模式对比研究

现代汉语动词“去”与越语动词“?i”句法语义属性对比分析及教学建议

现代汉语动词“去”与越语动词“?i”句法语义属性对比分析及教学建议

Metaphorical language change is Self-Organized Criticality

Abstract One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as complex systems and the dynamic view of metaphor, this paper argues that metaphorical language change qualifies as a Self-Organized Criticality state and the linguistic expressions of a metaphor can be profiled as a fractal with spatio-temporal correlations. Synchronously, these metaphorical expressions self-organize into a self-similar, scale-invariant fractal that follows a power-law distribution; temporally, long range interdependence constrains the self-organization process by the way of transformation rules that are intrinsic of a language system. This argument is verified in the paper with statistical analyses of twelve randomly selected Chinese verb metaphors in a large-scale diachronic corpus.

한국어적 사고로 바라본 중국어의 언어구조 고찰

The purpose of this study is to examine the connection between the semantic function and grammatical structure of the Chinese word “activity verb” in the category above. This is an attempt to explain the Chinese active verb syntax, which was difficult to understand due to the grammatical structure of the Korean language, with the commercial characteristics of the verb. Therefore, words that do not match the Chinese language structure are not searched. This paper shows that the qualities inherently shared by verbs in language structure are at work. In line with this, it is suggested that Korean speakers can solve the questions faced by the Chinese grammar structure by looking at the commercial characteristics of verbs and considering the constraints and semantic changes of Chinese active verbs. Furthermore, it is possible to explain why some grammatical phenomena are always described as having two or more meanings depending on the commercial characteristics of the active verb.