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.
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Notes
- 1.
Lin et al. once put forward in the “Modern Chinese Verb Dictionary” that “looking at the object from the back of the verb, the verbs are divided into two categories, those with object are called transitive verbs, and those without object are called intransitive verbs”. This paper adopts the definition of intransitive verb and object by Lin et al., among which the object specifically includes patient, objective and result, and the non-object includes semantic roles except the patient, objective and result.
- 2.
Select high frequency disyllabic verbs according to Zipf’s law.
- 3.
- 4.
In the data of disyllabic intransitive verbs and their objects in this paper, there are 5 single-morpheme words appearing as intransitive verbs, including ‘腻歪’ (nìwai, ‘disgusted’), ‘溜达’ (liūda, ‘walk’), ‘咆哮’ (páoxiào, ‘roar’), ‘辗转’ (zhǎnzhuǎn, ‘move’) and ‘团圆’(tuányuán, ‘reunion’), three of which can take objects, namely ‘溜达’, ‘咆哮’ and ‘辗转’. Examples of them with objects are ‘自己溜达公园’ (zìjǐ liūda gōngyuán, ‘walk in the park by myself’, ‘巨狮咆哮山谷’ (jùshī páoxiào shāngǔ, ‘the lion roars the valley’, and ‘民警辗转交城、文水等地’ (mínjǐng zhǎnzhuǎn jiāochéng, wénshuǐ děng dì, ‘police moved in Jiaocheng County, Wenshui County and other places’).
- 5.
For the specific distribution of the number of verbs with different semantic types of objects, see the Baidu Netdisk link: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1ysqQVNBORdzJ-Ca50GnfQg (password: alhz).
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by Project supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China, “Study on the Characterization and Generation Method of Chinese Parataxis Graph” (No.62076038), BLCU Supported Project for Young Researchers Program (supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities) (22YCX044), and Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2022M710246).
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Zhou, S., Wang, C., Xun, E. (2023). Recognition of Disyllabic Intransitive Verbs and Study on Disyllabic Intransitive Verbs Taking Objects Based on Structure Retrieval. 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_21
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