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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
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).
References
Xing, F.: Chinese Grammar. Northeast Normal University Press, Changchun (1996). (in Chinese)
Zhao, Y.: Grammar of Spoken Chinese. The Commercial Press, Beijing (2005). (in Chinese)
Zhu, D.: Lectures on Grammar. The Commercial Press, Beijing (2005). (in Chinese)
Guo, J.: Try to talk about the phenomenon of intransitive verbs with objects such as “fly to Shanghai.” Stud. Chin. Lang. 05, 337–346 (1999). (in Chinese)
Zhang, Y.: A Study of The Acceptor Object Sentence in Modern Chinese. Xuelin Press, Shanghai (2004). (in Chinese)
Sun, T.: Research on The Realization Mode and Permission Mechanism of Non-core Argument in Modern Chinese. Publishing house of Chinese and western, Shanghai (2019). (in Chinese)
Diao, Y.: Also talk about “verb-object verb + object” form. Lang. Plann. 06, 39–41 (1998). (in Chinese)
Gao, G.: Collocation rules of “verb-object verb + object.” Lang. Plann. 06, 36–38 (1998). (in Chinese)
Liu, Y., Li, J.: The transformation form of “verb-object verb + object” and the semantic type of object. J. Jianghan Univ. 05, 44–48 (1998). (in Chinese)
Zhang, B.: The condition and development trend of “verb-object structure + object.” Res. Ancient Chin. Lang. 03, 2–6 (1999). (in Chinese)
Zhu, J., Sheng, X.: On the formation of verb-object structure with object format. Chin. Lang. Learn. 03, 37–42 (2008). (in Chinese)
Lin, X., Wang, L., Sun, D.: A Dictionary of Chinese Verbs. Beijing Language and Culture Institute Press, Beijing (1994). (in Chinese)
Yuan, Y.: On the hierarchical relation and semantic features of the thematic roles in Chinese. Chin. Teach. World 03, 10–22+2 (2002). (in Chinese)
Fang, Q.: A Dictionary of Modern Chinese Prepositions. The Commercial Press, Beijing (2017). (in Chinese)
Yu, S., Zhu, X., Wang, H.: A Detailed Explanation of Modern Chinese Grammatical Information Dictionary. Tsinghua University Press, Beijing (2003). (in Chinese)
Huang, B., Liao, X.: Modern Chinese (Revised sixth Edition) (Volume 1). Higher Education Press, Beijing (2017). (in Chinese)
Xun, E., Rao, G., Xiao, X., Zang, J.: The development of BCC corpus in the context of big data. Corpus Linguist. 01, 93–109+118 (2016). (in Chinese)
Lu, L., Jiao, H., Li, M., Xun, E.: A discourse-base Chinese chunkbank. Acta Automatica Sinica. 1–12 (2021). http://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/11.2109.TP.20200521.1558.007.html. (in Chinese)
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).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28952-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28953-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)