WORD INTERNAL STRUCTURE IN CHINESE: EVENT STRUCTURE, PREDICATE-ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND CATEGORIES IN SEPARABLE VERBS

Date

2024-2

Author

Kao, Tzu-Ching

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The study of Chinese separable verbs has long been one of the unresolved and under-debated challenges in the field of Chinese linguistics due to their indivisible semantics, yet decomposable syntactic behaviors of separable verbs. In addition to this general conundrum that separable words pose for linguists, the second reason that makes the analysis of separable verbs difficult is the diverse range of syntactic modifications that separable verbs can accommodate. In this study, we analyze separable verbs as multi-word expressions to address the discrepancy in their behaviors at the syntactic and semantic levels via a radically lexicalized formalism, Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). In addition, as we observed that the event structures of separable verbs were linked to the previously mentioned diversity, we conducted a small-scale corpus study to investigate this issue. Our findings indicated that two composite events accounted for 40% of the syntactic flexibility observed in 21 different intervening structures in our experiment. It is noteworthy that the verbs involved in composite telic events (accomplishments) and non-composite telic events (achievements) exhibited contrasting syntactic flexibility. This distinct—compositionality—significantly influenced the syntactic flexibility of separable verbs. We incorporated these findings into our CCG analysis to complete our research.

Subject Keywords

separable verbs, CCG, event structure, Chinese

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109188

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Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis