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Profiling the Mandarin Physical Contact Verbs with ná, wò, chí and zhuā Using Collocational, Syntactic and Discourse Features

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14514))

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Abstract

This study aims to provide a preliminary comparison of Mandarin Physical Contact verbs with ná ‘carry’, wò ‘grasp’, chí ‘hold’, and zhuā ‘grab’ by adopting a behavior profiling approach. Based on previous theoretical studies, the four verbs are intensively examined in terms of collocational, syntactic and discourse features in Sect. 2. Besides, the linguistic features are turned into categorical or binary features in Sect. 3 to generate the high dimensional vectors of the chosen verbs to allow multifactorial analysis to compare the subtle differences in meanings of the four verbs. The results support that wò ‘grasp’ and zhuā ‘grab’ share more semantic-syntactic similarities and ná ‘carry’ is more similar to wò ‘grasp’ and zhuā ‘grab’ cluster. Whereas chí ‘hold’ behaviors most differently from the remaining three. The study also finds out that wò ‘grasp’ and zhuā ‘grab’ cluster is differentiated from chí ‘hold’ and ná ‘carry’ cluster mostly in its syntactic features.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Wuhan Insititute of Technology, Wuhan, China

    Qian Zhong

  2. School of Humanities, Central South University, Changsha, China

    Tianqi He

Authors
  1. Qian Zhong
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  2. Tianqi He
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tianqi He .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  3. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jingxia Lin

  4. Leshan Normal University, Leshan, China

    Peng Jin

Appendix 1. Overview of Feature Types and Number of Categories of Each Feature

Appendix 1. Overview of Feature Types and Number of Categories of Each Feature

Feature level

Feature Type

Feature

Categories

Collocational

modifier

aspectual markers Le

2

modifier

aspectual markers Zhe

2

modifier

directional_marker

2

modifier

locational marker

2

modifier

DOU

2

modifier

negation_marker

2

modifier

deictic_ marker

2

modifier

deictic_preverb_marker

2

modifier

time_marker

2

modifier

temporal/frequency

2

modifier

quantitative marker

2

Syntactic

noun phrase

agent

2

noun phrase

agent_semantic_type

4

noun phrase

object

2

noun phrase

object_semantic_type

6

noun phrase

complement

2

noun phrase

complement_negation

2

noun phrase

complement_semantic_type

5

noun phrase

POS_verb

2

noun phrase

manner

2

noun phrase

manner_semantic_type

4

Discourse

sentence

with

2

sentence

for_to

2

clause

serial_verb_construction

2

clause

order_in_SVC

3

clause

semantic_relation_of_SVC

6

clause

semantic_type_of_the_other_VP

7

sentence

object_fronting

2

sentence

syntactic function of VP

4

sentence

FE_place

2

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Zhong, Q., He, T. (2024). Profiling the Mandarin Physical Contact Verbs with ná, wò, chí and zhuā Using Collocational, Syntactic and Discourse Features. In: Dong, M., Hong, JF., Lin, J., Jin, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14514. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0583-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0583-2_17

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