Abstract
This paper examines the representation of verbal semantics for a pair of near-synonyms expressing tolerance in Chinese: ren3 and shou4. Following Churen Huang’s MARVS theory, we explore the differences in the eventive information of the two words with results from the Chinese Gigaword corpus as evidence. Although they both belong to the state event type, our corpus analyses reveal their distinctive attributes in the event and role modules. First, they vary in the range of the subjects and objects, showing that ren3 underlines active endurance and shou4 predominately indicates passive suffering or acceptance. Second, ren3 and shou4 differ greatly in the connotation they carry: ren3 can exhibit a positive spirit that highlights one’s strong will to overcome obstacles, while shou4 carries both negative and positive meanings. This study demonstrates that the combination of corpus-based methodology and the lexical semantics approach is highly useful in distinguishing subtle differences between near-synonym pairs.
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Panyu Qin and Chunhong Huang contributed equally to this paper.
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Huang, C., Qin, P., Wang, X. (2023). Active and Passive Expressions of Tolerance: A Semantic Analysis of the Near-Synonyms ren3 and shou4 Based on MARVS Theory. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13495. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_4
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