A Corpus-Based Study: Delimiting Mandarin Carry and Hold Verbs by Constrasting ná 拿 and wò 握

This study aims to differentiate Mandarin carry and hold verbs by contrasting their syntactic-semantic behaviors as well as conceptual frameworks with a corpus-based lexical constructional approach. Ná 拿 and wò 握 are intensively examined in terms of their contrastive collocational distributions and semantically constrained frame elements as being the crucial memeber of Mandarin carry and hold verbs respectively. It is found that wò 握 tend to collocate with static markers such as zhù 住 and zhe着, which is consistent with its prototypical meaning denoting ‘prolonged contact’. Whereas, ná 拿 is more likely to co-occur with directional markers such as dào 到, lái 来, qù 去, zǒu 走, jìn 进 and chū 出, which is constrained by its core semantics indicating ‘caused motion’. The conceptual frameworks of ná 拿 and wò 握 have been proposed according to their corpus-based syntactic behaviors, which accounts for their distinct language-specific patterns. Thus, it should be deliberate to draw the conclusion that ná 拿 and wò 握 belong to carry and hold verbs seperately. This study is significant in providing an initial comparison between Mandarin carry and hold verbs in terms of their syntactic behaviors and semantically constrained frameworks, which shed light on the construction of Mandarin VerbNet.
Introduction
English verb classes have been extensively studied in terms of semantic inter-relations (Miller et al., 1990) as well as diathesis alternations (Levin, 1993). Other scholars (Dorr, 1997; Hoa Trang Dang et al. 1998) went a step further to subdivide English verb categories with the method of tying semantic features to syntactic structures. Whereas, Mandarin verb classes have not been finely examined in the aspect of their distinct semantic properties along with syntactic behaviors.
Diverse methodologies have been conducted on behalf of refining Mandarin verb categories. It is concluded that a straightforward adoption of Levin’s verb classes to Mandarin is not cost-effictive due to the flexibility of its syntactic arguments (Liu 1996; Majewska et al., 2018). A corpus-based approach has been proposed to delimit Mandarin near-synonyms by comparing their semantic distinctions (Tsai et al., 1998; Huang et al., 1999; Liu et al., 2000), which shed light on the subdivision of Mandarin verb classes. Furthermore, Liu (2016) came up with a lexical-constructional interface in order to explore Mandarin emotion verbs such as xiànmù 羡慕 and jìdù 忌妒 by means of examining their form-meaning mapping relations. The above approach is echoed in this article and adopted to explore the distinguishing semantic and syntactic features between Mandarin carry and hold verbs, which represented by ná 拿 and wò 握respectively.