Abstract
This is a corpus-based study of the near-synonymous pair Guān 關 and Bì 閉 in Mandarin. We adopt the Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) to analyze the differences between this pair of words. There are three shared senses: ‘to close the opening of a specific object’ (hereafter ‘close an opening’), ‘to stop a machine by using a switch’ (hereafter ‘stop a machine’), and ‘to close stores or agencies’ (hereafter ‘close a store’). The event of ‘close an opening’ in Guān 關 is a composite event of a dual process-state, while Bì 閉 is a composite event of a completive resultative. The event relating to ‘stop a machine’ was not found for Bì 閉. The events of ‘close a store’ for both Guān 關 and Bì 閉 are simplex events of an inchoative state. However, Guān 關 often appears in collocates such as Guānchǎng 關廠, while Bì 閉 has collocates such as Bìguǎn 閉館. It is also discovered that Guān 關 emphasizes not only the process of the activity but also the state after the activity. However, Bì 閉 emphasizes only the state after the activity.
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Notes
- 1.
Chinese WordNet: http://lope.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw/cwn2.
- 2.
Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese: http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/index_readme.htm.
- 3.
Shuowenjiezi《說文解字》: http://www.zdic.net/z/swjz/.
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Lin, MC., Chung, SF. (2018). A Corpus-Based Lexical Semantic Study of Mandarin Verbs: Guān and Bì. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_30
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