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<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <Paper uid="W04-2614"> <Title>Fine-Grained Lexical Semantic Representations and Compositionally-Derived Events in Mandarin Chinese</Title> <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 2 Event Types </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> The earliest theory of verbal argument structure involves generalized collections of semantic roles, known as a case frame (Fillmore, 1968) or a theta-grid (Stowell, 1981) under the framework of Government and Binding Theory. The idea of semantic roles was first explicated in Fillmore's seminal paper, &quot;The Case for Case&quot; (1968), which argues that the propositional component of a sentence can be represented as an array consisting of the verb and a number of noun phrases specifically marked with roles such as agent, patient, instrument, and goal. These labels identify the grammatically relevant aspects of the roles that pertain to argument realization in the syntax. A verb is defined by the semantic roles that it &quot;takes&quot;, i.e., its case frame. For example, love takes an agent and a patient, while frighten takes an experiencer and a stimulus.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> A theory of argument structure is not complete without an associated linking theory that explicitly maps arguments in the lexical semantic representation (semantic roles) to syntactic arguments. Approaches based on semantic roles often formulate a linking theory in terms of a thematic hierarchy (Jackendoff, 1972): semantic roles are arranged in an abstract &quot;prominence&quot; hierarchy, and the realization of syntactic arguments is based on the position of roles in this hierarchy. The highest role in the thematic hierarchy is assigned the highest argument position in the syntactic structure (the subject), the next highest role is assigned the next highest argument, and so forth. Thematic hierarchies are believed to be an independent and irreducible module of grammar.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> There has been considerable debate over the ordering of roles on thematic hierarchies. In fact, the actual inventory of semantic roles, along with precise definitions and diagnostics, remains an unsolved problem. These are not the only drawbacks associated with theories of argument structure that rely on semantic roles:1 Some analyses show that semantic roles are too coarse-grained to account for certain semantic distinctions. The only recourse, to expand the collection of roles, comes with the price of increased complexity, e.g., in the linking rules.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Fillmore's original assumption that each noun phrase in an utterance occupies a unique thematic role is often called into question. For some verbs, e.g., resemble, multiple noun phrases appear to have the same semantic role.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> Finally, because case frames are &quot;flat&quot;, i.e., lacking any internal structure, a theory based purely on semantic roles lacks real explanatory power. Why is it, for example, that love takes an obligatory agent and an obligatory patient? Why is the instrument role in open optional? These theories cannot offer satisfactory answers because they do not directly refer to the meaning of predicates.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> Recognizing the drawbacks of theories based purely on semantic roles, there is now a general consensus among linguists that argument structure is (to a large extent) predictable from event semantics--hence, patterns of argument realization should be inferable from lexical semantic representations grounded in a theory of events.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> These event representations typically decompose seman- null Although Aristotle (Metaphysics 1048b) observed that the meanings of some verbs involve an &quot;end&quot; or a &quot;result&quot;, and other do not, it wasn't until the twentieth century that philosophers and linguists developed a classification of event types which captures logical entailments and the co-occurrence restrictions between verbs and other syntactic elements such as tenses and adverbials. Vendler's (1957) classification of events into states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements is groundbreaking in this respect. In his event ontology, activities and states both depict situations that are inherently temporally unbounded (atelic); states denote static situations, whereas activities denote on-going dynamic situations. Accomplishments and achievements both express a change of state, and hence are temporally bounded (telic); achievements are punctual, whereas accomplishments extend over a period of time. Examples of the four event types are given below:</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> Accomplishments Achievements </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> paint a picture recognize make a chair find deliver a sermon lose Although activities group naturally with states and accomplishments with achievements in terms of telicity, it has also been observed that states can be grouped with achievements and activities with accomplishments in that that first pair lacks the progressive tense, while the second pair allows them (cf. Lakoff, 1966; Shi, 1988). To capture these properties, Vendler's classes can be further decomposed in terms of independent features (cf. Andersen, 1990; Van Valin and LaPolla, 1997:91-102): (2) a. State: [!telic, !durative, !dynamic] b. Activity: [!telic, +durative, +dynamic] c. Achievement: [+telic, !durative +dynamic] d. Accomplishment: [+telic, +durative +dynamic] Vendler's work on ontological types of events serves as a foundation upon which others have grounded lexical semantic representations and theories of verbal argument structure. Dowty's seminal work (1979) attempts to decompose states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements in terms of the primitives DO, CAUSE, and BECOME: (3) a. state: ...n(fi1;:::;fin) b. activity: DO(fi1;[...n(fi1;:::;fin)]) c. achievement: BECOME[...n(fi1;:::;fin)] d. accomplishment:</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Examples of Dowty's theory applied to English sentences are shown below: (4) a. He sweeps the floor clean. [ [ DO(he, sweeps(the floor)) ] CAUSE [ BECOME [ clean(the floor) ] ] ] b. John walks.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> In what later becomes a standard analysis adopted by subsequent linguists, Dowty breaks causative sentences down into two subevents: a causing subevent and a result subevent. The representation of the resultative sentence (4a) is comprised of the causing subevent &quot;he sweeps the floor&quot; and the result subevent &quot;the floor is clean&quot;. Unergative verbs, on the other hand, are represented by a single subevent with the primitive DO.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> Rappaport Hovav and Levin's more recent theory of event templates (1998) also defines a basic inventory of event building blocks in terms of Vendler's event types:</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> (Rappaport Hovav and Levin, 1998:108) A verb's meaning consists of a constant paired with a particular event template drawn from the basic inventory above. Constants are open-class items drawn from a fixed ontology (e.g., manner, instrument, state, etc.) and are represented within the angle brackets of the event template. An important claim of this theory is that verbs directly encode, or lexicalize, complex event structures.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> To account for complex events and secondary predi- null cation, Rappaport Hovav and Levin propose a process called Template Augmentation that allows basic event templates to be freely &quot;augmented&quot; to any other event template. This process, for example, explains the resultative form of surface contact verbs like sweep: (6) a. Phil swept the floor.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> [ Phil ACT<SWEEP> floor ] b. Phil swept the floor clean.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> In this case, an activity has been augmented into an accomplishment through the addition of another subevent, i.e., the floor becoming clean (note similarities with Dowty's representation). In order to bring the lexical semantic representation &quot;into alignment&quot; with syntactic structure for the purpose of argument realization, Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) propose well-formedness constraints and linking rules such as the following: (7) a. Immediate Cause Linking Rule. The argument of a verb that denotes the immediate cause of the eventuality described by that verb is its external argument.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> b. Directed change Linking Rule. The argument of the verb that corresponds to the entity undergoing the directed change described by that verb is its internal argument.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> Vendler's ontology of verbal types has paved the way for many important developments in lexical semantics.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="14"> Although the role of lexical aspect in argument realization has been called into question (Levin, 2000), this generally-accepted classification of events figures prominently in most theories of verbal argument structure. Of great interest both theoretically and for the purposes of building language applications, therefore, is the typological organization of verbal systems in different languages. Can Vendler's event type ontology, which was originally developed for English, be directly applied to other languages as well? The answer, I will demonstrate, at least for Mandarin Chinese, is no.</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 4 The Mandarin Verbal System </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> I will argue that the typology of Mandarin Chinese verbs is very different from that of English verbs. Specifically, I make the following claims: (8) a. Activity and state are the only two primitive verbal types in Mandarin Chinese.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Accomplishments and achievements are derived compositionally.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> b. With a small number of exceptions, there are no monomorphemic verbs in Mandarin that are telic--no monomorphemic verb necessarily encodes a result, an end state, or the attainment of a goal.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> c. The particle le, among other uses, signals inchoativity.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> The somewhat controversial claim that Mandarin lacks monomorphemic accomplishments and achievements has been previously made by a number of linguists, most notably Tai (1984); see also (Shi, 1988). These works serve as a starting point for my inquiry into the typological organization of Mandarin verbs.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> One important bit of evidence is the existence of activity/achievement verb pairs in English, which are not present in Mandarin: In English, for example, the verb look expresses an atelic activity, while the verb see expresses a telic achievement that lexicalizes the attainment of a goal (i.e., the successful act of perception). Mandarin Chinese, however, does not have monomorphemic counterparts for English achievements. To encode an end state, Chinese speakers must resort to resultative verb compounds, where the first verb denotes the activity, and the second verb denotes the result. For verbs of perception, two different result morphemes are typically used: jian4, best glossed as 'perceive', and dao4, literally 'arrive'. The claim that resultative verb compounds are required to explicitly encode the result state is supported by the grammaticality of sentences that explicitly deny the attainment of the goal: intended: 'He saw for a long time, but couldn't see it.' Another important bit of evidence comes from the interpretations of accomplishments. In English, accomplishments are compatible with both in and for adverbials, the standard diagnostic for telicity: (13) a. John wrote a letter for an hour.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> b. John wrote a letter in a hour.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> As demonstrated in the above example, writing a letter can be interpreted as either atelic (13a) or telic (13b). The atelic interpretation is to be understood as &quot;John engaged in the activity of letter writing for an hour&quot;, whereas the telic interpretation implies the completion of the letter. Both readings are generally available, but in the past tense, the telic accomplishment is much more salient. Thus, to deny the completion of the goal renders the sentence decidedly odd: (14) #John wrote a letter yesterday, but he didn't finish it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> It is, however, not very difficult to construct a context that renders the above sentence felicitous: (15) John is always writing letters, but he never finishes any of them. In fact, John wrote a letter yesterday, but as usual, he didn't finish it.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> The situation in Mandarin, however, is very different. It appears that the Chinese counterpart of write, xie3, has no reading that necessarily implies completion of the di- null 'I wrote a letter yesterday, but I didn't finish it.' In fact, the only way to encode completion of the letter writing is, once again, through a resultative verb compound such as xie3 wan2 'write-finish'.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> I have thus far demonstrated that the Mandarin equivalent of many English verbs cannot be expressed monomorphemically, but rather must involve a verbal compound. In order to defend my claims, however, the following (apparent) counterexamples must be explained: It appears that dao3 and sui4 are monomorphemic verbs that express change of state. In order for my claims to be correct, I would have to demonstrate that such verbs are actually derived from more basic forms. Indeed, this is the case: the examples above are derived from underlying stative predicates--the particle le signals inchoativity. The following stative/inchoative minimal pair presents evidence for my theory: 'The tree grew ten centimeters.' The only difference in the two above sentences is the presence/absence of le. The particle, therefore, must contribute the semantic component of inchoativity. Similar minimal pairs related to prenominal modifiers show this 'glass that was shattered' (resultative participle) The above pair represents a subtle but detectable difference in meaning; whereas (19a) describes a pure state, (19b) describes the result of an event. This distinction exactly parallels the difference between an open door and an opened door in English. Once again, since the sentences differ only by le, the particle must be contributing that semantic component. As further evidence, consider the following minimal pair: Once again, the stative reading is contrasted with the change of state reading. The interpretation of the above two sentences is consistent with the analysis of le as a signal of inchoativity.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> It is clear from the above minimal pairs that the particle le combines with stative predicates to gives rise to change of state interpretations. Are these derived events achievements or accomplishments? Dowty (1979) provides the following diagnostics: Accomplishments are generally compatible with the progressive; some achievements appear felicitous (e.g., okis winning), while others do not (e.g., *is noticing). Accomplishments, since they are durative, are generally acceptable as the complement of stop, whereas the punctual nature of achievements renders them ungrammatical. These diagnostics clearly demonstrate that the addition of le shifts stative predicates into achievements: floor intended: 'The glass is in the process of shattering all over the floor.' floor intended: 'The glass stopped shattering all over the floor.' It is interesting to note that many achievements in Mandarin cannot directly causativize into the transitive form: intended: 'Zhangsan shattered the glass.' Instead, a resultative verb compound is necessary to express an accomplishment. Typically, the second verb denotes the result (end state) of the event, while the first verb denotes the activity that brings about the end state: 'Zhangsan shattered the glass.' Putting all the pieces together, the organization of the Mandarin verbal system can be summarized as follows: (26) primitive event types: activity, state state + le ! achievement activity + achievement ! accomplishment Activity and state are the two primitive verbal categories in Mandarin. Non-causative change of state predicates (achievements) are derived from states with the addition of the particle le. Accomplishments are further derived from achievements through the formation of resultative verb compounds in which the first verb denotes an activity, and the second verb the end state.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> Traditionally, the particle le that appears post-verbally has been analyzed as an aspectual marker denoting perfectivity (Li and Thompson, 1981). This contrasts with my analysis of it as a signal of inchoativity. How are these two approaches to be reconciled? In (Lin, 2004b), I argue that le is a reflex, rather than an overt realization of the underlying inchoative marker. As generally defined, perfective aspect is not compatible with stative predicates. However, the addition of a covert inchoative functional head, in effect, licenses the perfective aspect.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 5 Computational Significance? </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Why is this peculiar organization of the Mandarin verbal system important for lexical semantic representations designed for language applications? It demonstrates that, at least for languages such as Mandarin Chinese, the verb phrase must be rich in internal structure; a verb cannot be simply viewed as a predicate of its arguments. Evidence from Mandarin resultative verb compounds demonstrate that verbal predicates themselves must be compositionally built from underlying primitives.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> It is important to note that the formation of verbal compounds in Chinese is a fully productive process--the only constraint on verb combinations appears to stem from plausible real-world associations between cause and effect. The following shows but a small range of possible resultative verb compounds with the dao3 'fall' result: (27) kan3 dao3 chop-fall to chop down zhuang4 dao3 crash-fall to knock over tui1 dao3 push-fall to push over la1 dao3 pull-fall to pull down In principle, verbal compound formation in Mandarin could be a lexical process, but I present elsewhere independent evidence for a non-lexicalist approach that captures these constraints in the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, an extension of Chomsky's Minimalist Program (Lin, 2004a; Lin, 2004b). However, the actual machinery for formalizing these insights is not important for the present discussion. The important lessons are the theoretical constraints imposed by verbal typology on lexical semantic representations designed for language applications. More specifically: (28) a. verbs have rich internal structure expressible in terms of finer-grained primitives of meaning, and b. at least for some languages, verbal meaning is compositionally derived from these primitive elements.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> These claims imply that a PropBank or FrameNet approach to lexical semantics will not be sufficient for many language applications, at least for languages such as Mandarin Chinese. While I may disagree with the technical details, I believe that the approach taken by (Dang et al., 2000) is on the right path. Due to the productivity of verbal phenomena in Mandarin, it is impossible to exhaustively enumerate all felicitous predicates-verbal meaning, therefore, must be compositionally derived from primitive elements. This however, does not mean that PropBank or FrameNet are not useful; quite the contrary! Existing semantic resources serve as the foundation from which we can bootstrap finer-grained semantic representations.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> While the approach Palmer and Wu (1995) take to lexical semantics captures many selectional restrictions and finer-grained facets of meaning, it still does not model the arbitrary productivity of verbal compounds. For the purposes of translating English change of state verbs into Mandarin, they developed a conceptual lattice that unifies verbs from both languages. Distances between nodes in this lattice correspond to &quot;semantic distance&quot;, and is used to find the closest translation if a specific meaning is unavailable. Although this approach results in better lexical selection, the semantic lattice still assumes that all verbal forms can be exhaustively enumerated. Although this certainly may be true within the context of a specific corpus, the productivity of Mandarin verbal phenomena is limitless in the real world.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> I believe that, for all languages in general, verbal meanings are compositionally built up from states and activities. Furthermore, this process is syntactic in nature (Lin, 2004b), governed by well-known syntactic processes such as MERGE (Chomsky, 1995) and subjected to well-studied constraints such as selectional restrictions and the Head Movement Constraint (Travis, 1984). This contrasts with Rappaport Hovav and Levin's (1998) &quot;event template&quot; approach, which is lexicalist in that large chunks of event structure are directly associated with verbs. Under their analysis, the lexical entry associated with sui4 'shatter' would be something like:</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> Rappaport Hovav and Levin's theory argues that a verb's meaning is composed of an event template that captures the structural component of meaning and open-class constants that capture the idiosyncratic component of meaning (represented by items in angle brackets). This separation is a major breakthrough in lexical semantic theories because it allows grammatically relevant facets of meaning to be untangled from facets of meaning not directly relevant to the encoding of arguments. Descriptively, the structural component of meaning is what a verb shares with other verbs in the same verb class, whereas the idiosyncratic component of meaning is what separates verbs within the same verb class.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> In Rappaport Hovav and Levin's account of verbal argument structure, complex event representations are directly introduced in the syntax; that is, the verb lexicalizes a complete causative accomplishment--to shatter implicates an agent participating in an unspecified activity that brings about a change of state where an entity becomes shattered. In English, they propose that intransitive verbs are derived by a process of &quot;decausativization&quot; through which the external argument is &quot;absorbed&quot;, and therefore remains unexpressed (Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995). Such a theory is unable to account for the derivation of Mandarin resultatives such as da3 sui4 'hitshatter'. If (29) is indeed the representation of sui4 'shatter', then what is the lexical semantic representation of da3 'hit'? There are, in principle, two alternatives: (30) Option 1: da3 'hit' = [ x ACT<HIT> ] Option 2: da3 'hit' = < HIT > One might suggest that da3 'hit' is associated with its own event template that somehow gets merged with the lexical entry of sui4 'shatter'. In order for this approach to be tenable, one has to explicate the process by which verbs are &quot;fused&quot; (and in many cases, how arguments of both verbs are sometimes merged or remain unexpressed); Li (1990) provides exactly such a lexical account, although it has been found to be problematic for many cases (Cheng and Huang, 1994). The other option is to suggest that da3 'hit' merely encodes the idiosyncratic component of meaning, without an associated event template. This, however, cannot be true because da3 'hit' itself can be used as a main verb: 'Zhangsan hit the glass.' The only plausible solution is that verbs encode small fragments of event structure, which are compositionally built up by regular syntactic processes. This approach also provides a natural solution for handling verbs that are derivationally related to other lexical categories, e.g., deadjectival verbs such as flatten, widen, modernize, and legalize. These derivational affixes obviously contribute the inchoative component of meaning that turns states (adjectives) into change of states: (32) flat: [state flat] -en: ,s,x:BECOME(x; BE(s)) flat-en: ,x:BECOME(x; BE([state flat])) In such a treatment, for example, the complete semantics of a word can be compositionally derived from its component morphemes. This framework, where the &quot;semantic load&quot; is spread more evenly throughout the lexicon to lexical categories not typically thought to bear semantic content, is essentially the model advocated by Pustejovsky (1991a), among others. Such an analysis of verbal phenomena marks a departure from the standard architectural view of morphological analysis as a preprocessor--instead, morphological and syntactic derivation can be integrated under a common framework.</Paragraph> </Section> class="xml-element"></Paper>