Browsing by Author "Liu, Mei-chun"

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Mandarin verbal semantics: a corpus-based approach
(Crane Publishing, 2002)
Liu, Mei-chun
Semantic Profile as a Source of Polysemy: Insight from the Spatial-Configuration Verb fang in Mandarin
(2015)
Liu, Mei-chun
;
Chang, Jui-ching
;
外國文學與語言學碩士班
;
Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
This study provides a linguistic insight to the issue of polysemy. It shows that semantic profile, an important cognitive mechanism, may be the source of verbal polysemy. With a close examination of corpus distribution of the high-frequency verb [fang], we find that the diverse range of semantically and constructionally distinct uses of fang can be viewed as profiling different stages of a motion-initiated event chain. We therefore propose that a multifaceted verb such as fang may involve a cognitively salient sequence of events as its conceptual basis and the various senses of the verb may highlight various portions of the lexical base as a result of semantic profile.
The construction of Mandarin VerbNet: A frame-based study of statement verbs
(2008-04-01)
Liu, Mei-chun
;
Chiang, Ting-yi
;
外國語文學系
;
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
This paper introduces the infrastructure and the principles of a semantic framework used for the analysis and classification of verbs, developed with the aim of constructing a lexical database of Mandarin verbal semantics, called the Mandarin VerbNet. Distinct from most existing lexical databases that enumerate word senses without detailed grammatical considerations, the Mandarin VerbNet is designed to provide lexical semantic information based on grammatical descriptions and anchored in linguistic! theories. It looks for systematic correlations between syntax and semantics and classifies verbs according to these syntax-to-semantics correspondences. The framework adopts the approach of Frame Semantics (Fillmore & Atkins 1992) in defining verb meanings in a semantic frame and building a frame-based verbal lexicon, but it differs from the structure of the English FrameNet in distinguishing different scopes of frames. Evolved and refined from previous works (Liu, Chiang & Chang 2004, Liu & Wu 2003, Liu 2002), this study summarizes the Current model of the analytic framework with a detailed illustration from Mandarin statement verbs. It ultimately seeks to identify a theoretically sound and operationally effective representational scheme that bases its semantic analysis on grammatical behaviors and provides linguistic motivations for its semantic classifications.