Abstract
This chapter will examine the challenging issues in the semantic annotation of verbal information in Mandarin Chinese. It will also probe into the unique array of semantic properties encoded in the Mandarin verbal lexicon and propose a frame-based constructional approach that is aligned with linguistic premises in functional theories, including frame semantics, construction grammar, and cognitive grammar. Given that semantic processing pertains to cognitive mechanisms in general, the semantic transfer and profile of base schemas in event chains should be considered for verbal categorization and representation. The proposed approach has been adopted in the development of Mandarin VerbNet, which was designed to provide the lexical semantic information of the major classes of Mandarin verbs in an attempt to offer a linguistically valid and application useful representation of the Mandarin verbal lexicon.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, “Mandarin” refers to Putonghua (or Guoyu ““national language”“) and “Chinese” refers to the Chinese language, which includes Mandarin and other Chinese dialects.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
It should be noted that this approach adopted just the notion that verbal meanings could be distinguished by syntactic variants, but not the generative viewpoint.
- 5.
The remainder of this paragraph is in response to one of the reviewer’s concerns about the form of the semantic annotation in Mandarin VerbNet.
- 6.
Figure refers to the moved entity and ground refers to the location or endpoint (Talmy 1975).
- 7.
The seven domains are communication, cognition, perception, emotion, judgment, social interaction, and motion.
- 8.
Construction Markers are marked with an asterisk (*) to separate them from Frame Elements.
- 9.
Source is commonly unexpressed in syntax due to the cognition bias of human beings (Regier and Zheng 2007).
- 10.
“Locative_Marker” refers to the locative co-verb zai 在, which is semantically different from other path co-verbs such as jìn 進 and dao 到.
- 11.
The Placement Frame in Mandarin is quite similar to the English Placing Frame in FrameNet in terms of their semantic and syntactic behavior, and thus they can be compared.
- 12.
The source for the example is https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Placing
- 13.
The more general element tags are used here to show the cross-categorial properties of fang 放using [mover] and [ground] instead of [placer] and [Loc.Ground]/[End.Ground] (cf. [8] and [9]).
- 14.
This paragraph and following example are in response to one of the reviewer’s concerns about the constructional differences among the three sentences in Example 21.
- 15.
This paragraph is in response to one of the reviewer’s concerns about how annotated information can potentially improve present Chinese NLP tasks.
- 16.
WSD is a practical NLP task that aims at resolving lexical semantic ambiguity automatically by disambiguating the sense of a polysemous word based on its contextual information.
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Acknowledgments
The database presented in this chapter was made possible with the support of research grants from the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in earlier years and Strategic Research Grants from City University of Hong Kong since 2015. I would like to thank my research assistant, Mr. Jui-Ching Chang, for his valuable and diligent help in preparing the preliminary materials for the study and Dr. Mingyu Wan for her valuable assistance in reviewing and editing the information for this chapter. My hearty thanks also go to Dr. Tianqi He for her lead in the semantic annotation of verb frames. Any errors in the chapter are mine alone.
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Liu, M. (2023). Semantic Annotation and Mandarin VerbNet. In: Huang, CR., Hsieh, SK., Jin, P. (eds) Chinese Language Resources. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38913-9_12
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