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Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics

CLSW 2013: Chinese Lexical Semantics pp 229–240Cite as

Regularity and Idiomaticity in Chinese Separable Verbs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8229))

Abstract

This paper deals with the lexical representation of Chinese Separable Verbs (thereafter SVs) within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). We argue that SVs are syntactically flexible, but semantically decomposable or non-decomposable expressions, which are similar to the idiomatic expressions in English. For decomposable SVs, we specify the verbal parts of SVs selecting the nominal parts via the LID feature proposed by Sag (2007a). For decomposable SVs, we introduce a special lexical entry of the head verb to specify the idiomatic meaning with the co-occurring nominal part. For non-decomposable SVs, the syntactic structure is represented as a head-complement- phrase consisting of the head verb and the complement with an empty slash value. The meaning of idiomatic SVs is represented at the head.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Chinese Lang. & Lit., Peking University, 100871, Beijing, China

    Lulu Wang

  2. School of Lang. & Lit., Communication University of China, 100024, Beijing, China

    Lulu Wang

  3. Dept. of Philosophy and Humanities, Free University of Berlin, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Stefan Müller

Authors
  1. Lulu Wang
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  2. Stefan Müller
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Language Research Institute, Beijing Language and Culture University, No. 15 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, 100083, Beijing, China

    Pengyuan Liu

  2. School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, No. 5, Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, 100871, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

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Wang, L., Müller, S. (2013). Regularity and Idiomaticity in Chinese Separable Verbs. In: Liu, P., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8229. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45185-0_25

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-45184-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-45185-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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