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<Paper uid="P06-2050">
  <Title>When Conset meets Synset: A Preliminary Survey of an Ontological Lexical Resource based on Chinese Characters</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="385" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Background Issues of Chinese
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Ideographic Writing
2.1 Ideographic Script and Conceptual
Knowledge
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> From the view of writing system and cognition, human conceptual information has been regarded as being wired in ideographic scripts. However, in reviewing the contemporary linguistic literatures concerning with the discussions of the essence of Chinese writing system, we found that the main theoretical dispute lies in the fact that, both structural descriptions and psycholinguistic modeling seem to presume that the notions of ideography and phonography are mutually exclusive.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> To break the theoretical impass'e, we take a pragmatic position in claiming the tripartite properties of Chinese characters: They are logographic (morpho-syllabic) in essence, function phonologically at the same time, and can be interpreted ideographically and implemented as concept instances by computers.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="385" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Chinese Wordhood
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Roughly put, a Chinese character is regarded as an ideographic symbol representing syllable and meaning of a &amp;quot;morpheme&amp;quot; in spoken Chinese.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> But unlike most affixing languages, Chinese has alargeclassofmorphemes-whichPackard(2000) calls &amp;quot;bound roots&amp;quot; - that possess certain affixal properties (namely, they are bound and productive in forming words), but encode lexical rather than  grammatical information. These may occur as either the left- or right-hand component of a word. For example, the morpheme uni8F38 (/shu/; &amp;quot;transport&amp;quot;) can be used as either the first morpheme (e.g., uni8F38uni5165 (/y`un-r`u/; transport-into &amp;quot;import&amp;quot;), or the second morpheme (e.g., uni904Buni8F38 /y`un-shu/; transit-transport &amp;quot;conveyance&amp;quot;) of a dissyllabic word, but cannot occur in isolation.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The fuzzy boundary between free and bound morphemes is directly related to the notorious controversial notion of Chinese Wordhood.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> There are multiple studies showing that to a large extent, (trained or untrained) native speakers of Chinese disagree on what a (free) morpheme/word/compound is.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4">  Suchdifficultycouldbetracedbacktoitshistorical facts. In modern Mandarin Chinese, there is a strong tendency toward dissyllabic words, while the predominant monosyllabic words in ancient Chinese remain more or less a closed set. But the conceptual knowledge encoded in monosyllabic morphemes still have their influence even on contemporary texts, and thus resulting the difficulties of word-marking decision.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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