Abstract
The Chinese character shi (是) can indicate judgment or emphasis. When Shi (是) expresses judgment, it cannot be omitted from the sentence due to syntactic constraints. When shi (是) expresses emphasis, it can be omitted without affecting the integrity of the sentence. This paper claims that the bottom layer of Chinese language is a set of logical structures of event composed of semantic roles. Shi (是) expressing emphasis is the syntactic expression of a person’s attitude. It lies between the syntactic structure layer and the event structure layer with the function of extracting semantic roles. Shi (是) expressing emphasis can: (1) extract all event semantic roles; (2) be placed before the syntactic position of the extracted semantic role (3) be realized as deshi (的是) when it extracts the semantic role of theme.
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Notes
- 1.
In the event structure, the object refers to the person or thing that the action is performed for or to.
- 2.
Events include behavior and state. Because extraction of semantic role in states is similar to.
that in behavioral events, it will not be analyzed for now. In the logical formula, 【】marks additional semantic roles and peripheral semantic roles.
- 3.
Corpus analysis shows that the projections of instrument and manner can exchange positions in the syntactic structure. Within category 2, so can the projections of manner and object, and the projections of object and degree. But there is no exchange of syntactic position for projections of instrument and degree. Peripheral semantic roles include time, space, and direction, and because each semantic role itself is a category system, projection of peripheral semantic roles is more complicated. For the sake of simplicity, the usual projection order of the peripheral semantic roles is “time + location + direction”.
- 4.
“ba” (把) and “bei” (被) prepose the theme in the sentence and emphasizes the “cause/result”, demonstrating marked structures. Thus, they will not be analyzed in this article.
- 5.
“de + shi” structure can accept not only the semantic role of the theme but also the semantic role of the agent. It is believed that “shi” followed by the agent indicates judgment and is not the emphatic “shi”. Therefore it is excluded from this paper.
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Nan, H., Yu, L. (2021). Event Structure and Logical Semantic Operations of the Chinese Character Shi (是) Used for Emphasis. In: Liu, M., Kit, C., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12278. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_2
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