On Chinese Dative Alternation: a Corpus- Based Study on Object - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

On Chinese Dative Alternation: a Corpus- Based Study on Object Properties Paper No.: 181 Author(s): Huichen S. Hsiao and Shih-Wei Chan ����������������� ����������� National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan The 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW2020) This project is funded by MOST107-2410-H-003 -025 -MY2

1. Introduction • This paper aims to investigate how the semantic features of direct objects influence Mandarin dative alternation between double object constructions (DOC) and prepositional dative constructions (PDC). • Constructions are form-meaning pairings (Goldberg, 1995). • In Zhang (1999)’s Chinese dative constructions, (a paraphrase conveys) – DOC : “the agent with purposeful transfers of the patient to the recipient, and this action is successfully completed on site.” – PDC : “an explanation of an action of delivery toward the path.” • The association between constructions and verbs has been explored via collostructional analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsh, 2003; Colleman, 2009). • In this present study, we used collexeme analysis to investigate what the verb types are in dative alternation (DA) constructions. – (1) Double Object Construction: [NP1 VERB NP2 NP3] – (2) Prepositional Dative Construction [NP1 VERB NP3 GEI NP2]

1. Introduction • Zhang (1999) also points out the core-extended mechanism for dative alternation. – The giving objects: spatial entities (e.g. a brick), non-spatial entities (e.g. eye contact) and speech entities (e.g. oral message). – Typical DOs for DOC: spatial entities/ the extension: other entities • Liu’s (2006) core/extended meaning of transfer: – The indirect object’s core semantic role in dative alternation is the recipient. – If the semantic role of an indirect object is a patient or a goal, the dative alternation is less possible. – Liu (2006) doesn’t discuss the core-extended properties of direct objects in dative. alternation

1. Introduction • Thus, we further investigated Liu’s verb classification, as well as referencing Xu’s (2007, p.257) verb semantics. • Xu: defines three kinds of English verbs occurring in DOC. – 1. any verb with a clear giving action, e.g. give. – 2. verbs with an action of giving and manner, e.g. send . – 3. verbs with manner but no giving action, e.g. bake. • We integrated the concept of “transfer” from Liu (2006) and the concept of “giving” and “manner” from Xu (2007) to form our semantics features/rules, which allow us to classify dative verbs in this study and see what semantic ranges that the alternate/ non- alternate verbs share.

To sum up • 1. We conducted collostructional analyses on dative alternation and by calculating the associations between constructions and verbs. • 2. We determined whether the properties of direct objects and the properties of verbs individually influence dative alternation. • We adopted a corpus-based analysis on COCT 2016 and implemented a sentence completion task to investigate whether the semantic nature of direct objects affects its occurrence in specific constructions as well as tested cf. Liu’s (2006) classification of verb classes in Chinese dative constructions • Three Research questions:

2. Methodology • We utilized a corpus-based analysis in the COCT 2016 and a sentence completion task to investigate whether the semantic nature of direct objects affects its occurrence in specific constructions. – COCT 2016: written data collected from 2014 to 2016, comprising 170,119,181 words in total and restricted to only collected data in Taiwan. 2.2 2.1 A corpus-based Analysis Sentence-completion task 1. 2. 3. Collexeme analysis Analyze the alternate Co-varying analysis The semantic frame NSs’ dative Verbs Xu’s verb semantics in PDC preferences Zhang’s DOs Direct objects

2.1. Corpus Analyses • While the prepositional dative constructions are marked, it is difficult to extract double object construction-related data from the corpus. – We investigate dative alternation observed in the PDC and then manually examine in the COCT 2016 whether DOC occurs. 1. Collexeme analysis 2. Manually check the 4. Co-varying alternate between DOC & 3. Semantic features Fisher-Exact Test P- collexeme analysis PDC value<.05 Verbs (top 25 PDC collocation Verbs based on Xu’s PDC’s semantic frame frequent) – PDC classification (the representative Between two slots [_V* _N* gei _N*] objects + VERB) [VERB] [DIRECT OBJECT] Direct objects based on Zhang’s Whether the DOC also exists (alternate) Direct objects (top 10 frequent)– PDC verbs [VERB * DIRECT OBJECT] u by manually checking whether the most significant verbs in Representative the direct object-to-PDC verb overlap with the verbs which Direct Objects are also significant in the verb-to-PDC collexeme analysis.

2.2. Empirical Study • An online questionnaire: SurveyCake – To explore native speakers’ dative preferences • Using five alternative verbs designated with [+/-concrete] direct objects. The questionnaire was composed of ten items in total with each item providing subjects with one verb, one direct object, one indirect object and one subject. – We designed two respective sentences for each verb, which differ in the property of direct objects, e.g. concrete or non-concrete. • Participants were asked to produce a sentence using the provided words and optionally complementing sentences with other words if necessary.

3. Results l The preliminary result indicates that – (1) our corpus-based findings via collexeme analyses are mostly in line with Liu’s (2006) claims on verb classes and further support Zhang’s (1999) claims based on the prototype-extension theory. – (2) In Mandarin, verbs prefer PDC when occurring with [-concrete] objects. The concreteness of direct object might increase the probability of dative alternation. For instance, the semantic features of “manner” and “giving” for a dative verb determine the possibility of dative alternation. • Corpus analysis (3.1 & 3.2): verbs prefer PDC when occurring with [-concrete] objects (e.g. message) – we infer and argue that direct object concreteness might increase the probability of dative alternation. • Online task (3.3): native speakers have strong syntactic preferences for PDC when completing sentences with non-concrete objects.

3.1 Results of Collexeme Analyses • 22 verbs in PDC (Table1) and 9 direct objects in PDC are found significant through collexeme analyses. • Based on Liu’s (2006, p.870) verb lists, we identified 17 verbs that can be grouped into two lists. – 1. Alternate between PDC and DOC. – 2. Only PDC allowed. – The remaining 5 verbs are not listed in Liu’s list à grouped into 2 lists based on Liu’s classification. – 1. Alternate 2. Only PDC allowed

3.1 Results of Collexeme Analyses • We chose the alternate verbs of the 22 significant PDC verbs and chose one verb from each verb class as a candidate to analyze their verb semantics. – based on Liu’s (2006) verb “transfer” property (causing a theme to be successfully transferred) and Xu’s “giving” (the action of giving), “manner” (apparent manner of giving) properties. – we included two verbs that do not entirely correspond to Liu’s grouping in terms of dative alternation, fu ‘pay’ and ci ‘bestow’ in order to serve as testing materials in the sentence-completion task.

3.1 Results of Collexeme Analyses • It is inferred that the lexical property of “manner” and “giving” determine the possibility of dative alternation. • In particular, we checked alternation in Liu’s verb lists, where song ‘ give’, tigong ‘provide’, rang ‘yield’, jieshao ‘introduce’ are able to alternate between DOC and PDC. If the verb is embodied with the property of “giving”, it is often correlated with the lexical property of “transfer”. • Other verbs are only allowed to occur PDC because the lexical verbs lack the meaning of “giving” and some of them only entails the property of “manner”, causing them to be mainly compatible with the construction meaning of PDC.

Some cases that are different from Liu’s theory • The verb fu ‘pay’ belongs to • The verb ci ‘ bestow ’ belongs to “transfer of possession” based on Liu’s “promise” type and thus is Liu’s classes, which means this not allowed to be DOC. verb can alternate between DOC – Can alternate in COCT2016 with a and PDC. concrete direct object – Cannot alternate if the direct object is not a concrete entity

Find the alternated patterns • Table 3 shows the collocated pattern in PDC in order to address whether the direct object properties influence dative alternation. – We manually check in the COCT 2016 whether the same collocated patterns also occur in DOC by using the search pattern [VP * NP] as the DOC. – song ‘give’, tigong ‘ provide ’, mai ‘sell’ , jie ‘lend’ are found to be alternate among these nouns. (Table 4)