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Precipitation, condensation and suspension are different meteorological events involving water in different forms. They are conceptualised and conventionalised with various verbal constructions in Sinitic languages. In this paper, we analyse data from three Mandarin varieties and 229 Sinitic languages, as well as materials from Old Chinese, to support the claim that there is an underlying shared conceptualisation scheme to account for all the variations, and that traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) can be extracted based on the directionality expressed by these linguistic constructions and PoS of weather words. Specifically, we found that across all Mandarin varieties and Sinitic languages, the weather verbs for precipitation (e.g., rain, snow and hail) typically represent downward movement and the weather phenomena words can typically act as verbs in Old Chinese. On the other hand, although the weather verbs for condensation (e.g., dew and frost) also tend to represent downward movement but the weather nouns typically do not have verbal usage in Old Chinese. Lastly, the weather verbs for suspension (e.g., fog and mist) are directionally uncertain and cannot function as a verb in Old Chinese either. The radical Open image in new window shared by Chinese characters denoting these phenomena provided the conceptual ground for morpho-semantic and grammatical behaviours based on Hantology. Our findings not only have important implications for linguistic ontology and lexical semantics, but also lend support to the emerging area of language-based reconstruction of TEK.

This study examines linguistic synaesthesia based on both the corpus distribution and the modality rating of Mandarin synaesthetic adjectives. We find that the tendencies attested through the corpus-based and the experimental approaches are compatible, including: (1) the modality exclusivity is negatively correlated with the usage of Mandarin sensory adjectives in linguistic synaesthesia; and (2) the ratings on sensory modalities of Mandarin synaesthetic adjectives are consistent with the synaesthetic directionality of these adjectives. The paper thus argues for the cognitive reality of linguistic synaesthesia, which can be evidenced by both the language production in the corpus and the language processing in the behavior experiment.

We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving water in Chinese based on Hantology, a SUMO-based ontology of Chinese orthography. Our comprehensive investigation of the morphosemantic behaviours of these weather words in both Mandarin and Sinitic languages reveals that they are predicted by the directionality and momentum of their formation and movement. We studied events involving water in both liquid and solid forms: such as rain, snow, hail, fog, dew and frost. They share the radical 雨, which can be linked to two SUMO nodes according to Hantology. This ontological bifurcation can be shown to bring about not only the diversity of direction expressions referring to these words for water, but also the differences of semantic features and PoS between them in Archaic Chinese. Moreover, the momentum of different water forms is proposed to be the physical basis for the differences of PoS, semantic features and node linking.

This paper presents our work on using part-of-speech focused lexical substitution for data augmentation (PLSDA) to enhance the prediction capabilities and the performance of deep learning models. This paper explains how PLSDA uses part-of-speech information to identify words and make use of different augmentation strategies to find semantically related substitutions to generate new instances for training. Evaluations of PLSDA is conducted on a variety of datasets across different text classification tasks. When PLSDA is applied to four deep learning models, results show that classifiers trained with PLSDA achieve 1.3% accuracy improvement on average.

This paper proposes a new approach to the study of stance differences in different speaking communities based on comparable corpus-based study of near synonyms. In particular, we study the differences in stance implications of the same pair of near synonyms of two varieties of Mandarin Chinese cross the strait: in Taiwan and Mainland China. We show that important communication frame differences such as interpersonal power relation can be encoded lexically and sharing same lexical forms that express different power relations can lead to barriers in communication. More specifically, our study of the uses of near synonyms Open image in new window “guli” and Open image in new window “mianli” adopts both verbal semantic representation of MARVS theory and functional communication theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The stance differences in terms of implication of interpersonal relation variations in Taiwan and Mainland China are represented and accounted for in MARVS. Our study synergizes the verbal semantic representation of MARVS theory with the functional communication theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, especially in terms of tenor and modality. Our results also suggest that comparable corpus-driven, lexical semantics based approaches can provide a strong foundation for stance detection and classification of different communities.

This paper starts with an investigation of three coldness-related tactile words, viz. Open image in new window han2 ‘cold’, Open image in new window leng3 ‘cold’ and Open image in new window liang2 ‘cool’, in their synaesthetic and metaphorical uses in Modern Chinese. It is found that Open image in new window leng3 ‘cold’ is most versatile whereas Open image in new window liang2 ‘cool’ is most inert with regard to their synaesthetic and metaphorical mappings, with Open image in new window han2 ‘cold’ standing in the middle. Moreover, Open image in new window han2 ‘cold’ tends to be object-oriented, while Open image in new window liang2 ‘cool’ is likely to be subject-oriented, with Open image in new window leng3 ‘cold’ allowing both subject- and object-oriented readings. We further conduct a study on the uses of these three tactile words in Buddhist texts of Āgamas, finding that Open image in new window liang2 ‘cool’ was consistently employed to refer the nibbānic status. Apart from it, two counts of Open image in new window leng3 ‘cold’ exhibit the nibbānic meaning. However, Open image in new window han2 ‘cold’ is never attested in this philosophical meaning. It is interesting to note that a kind of tactile feeling is associated with nibbāna, even though nibbānic experience is supposed to transcend sensory experience. This finding, together with some other findings with regard to the relation between sensory expressions and nibbāna, can shed light on the linguistc expressions of the inexpressible nibbāna.

This paper applied the embodiment theory of metaphor to the study of linguistic synaesthesia. In particular, we tried to account for the distribution of synaesthetic uses of Mandarin adjectives for taste and smell in terms of the degree of embodiment of different bodily experiences. We have found that taste is involved frequently both as the source domain and as the target domain in linguistic synaesthesia of Mandarin adjectives, while smell is productive only as the target domain. Besides, the synaesthetic transfer from taste to smell has also been attested to be more predominant than the transfer in a reverse direction, i.e., from smell to taste. We have thus proposed that a finer-grained theory of embodiment is sorely needed to account for the subtle differences in synaesthetic patterns of taste and smell in Mandarin adjectives. That is, the degree of embodiment is not only relevant in terms of the traditional dichotomy of bodily versus non-bodily events in the embodiment theory. The degree of embodiment is also a crucial concept to differentiate physiologically-based events such as those involving sensory modalities, which thus should also be taken into consideration in the theory of embodiment.

This article aims to analyse the four major sense organs of human beings, viz., 眼 (yǎn, eyes), 耳 (ěr, ears), 口/嘴 (kǒu/zuǐ, mouth) and 鼻 (bi, nose), in Chinese compound words with the combination of Generative Lexicon Theory and Embodied Cognition. It was shown that Embodied Cognition gives us an idea of the locus of the source domain in figurative use of organ-related words. Meanwhile, qualia structure in Generative Lexicon Theory, in particular, can be used to examine which sense of the word is activated when combining with other morphemes in a compound word. Moreover, the study found that the involved qualia roles vary in different syntactic structures and metaphorization of the compound words, which further demonstrates different lexical compositionality and productivity of the four basic sense organ words.

In this study, we adopt a comparable corpus-based approach to investigate variations of three DO verbs in Mandarin Chinese: Open image in new window zuo ‘do’, Open image in new window gao ‘do’ and Open image in new window Open image in new window congshi ‘be engaged in’. Mandarin Chinese is unique in having three light verbs with bare meaning. The interesting and challenging facts about these three DO verbs are that: first, their usages can be differentiated even though they share the bare minimal meaning of ‘to do’; and second, their ranges of usages vary in different varieties of Chinese. How can the complex differentiations of these three verbs within one variety and across different varieties be accounted for with the minimal shared meaning? We tackle this challenge applying functions from Chinese Word Sketch to effectively identify the subtle differences among near-synonyms and their usage variations among different varieties with explicit semantic cues. This study thus underlines the contribution of empirical approaches when there is very little intuition to rely on.

The discrimination of near synonyms is one of the most important research areas in lexicology and lexical semantics. Traditional comparative studies of near synonyms are mostly introspection-based and corpus-based, both having disadvantages. Sketch Engine (SkE), a tool designed to automatically obtain grammatical and collocational relations of target words from huge amount of data, helps to avoid subjectivity and solves the problem of utilizing the massive amount of data efficiently. By making use of various functions of Chinese Word Sketch (CWS), this paper distinguishes three Chinese synonymous words mingwang, shengwang and weiwang and finds that shengwang and weiwang are closer in meaning and more similar in grammatical features. Our comprehensive detailed examination of similarities and differences between the three words through CWS will shed light on Chinese lexicography, near synonym discrimination as well as Chinese vocabulary teaching and learning.

This paper adopts a comparable corpus-based statistical approach to VO compound Variations in two varieties of Mandarin Chinese and examines the variations from a transitivity perspective. In recent years, more and more VO compounds are observed to have transitive usages. Previous studies categorize the transitivity of VO compound in a dichotomy way, while we argue that each VO actually differs in their degree of transitivity, especially when the variations between different variants of Mandarin are taken into consideration. The degree of transitivity can be measured by both transitivity frequency and its semantic/syntactic properties (follow the theory of Hopper and Thompson [1]). In our study, we compare the transitivity difference between Mainland and Taiwan Mandarin by adopting a corpus-based statistical approach. For both transitivity frequency and semantic/syntactic properties study, the results clearly show that Taiwan VO compounds have a higher degree of transitivity than the Mainland counterparts. We further argue that the higher transitivity degree in Taiwan also illustrates the conservatism of Taiwan Mandarin. This observation is consistent with the earlier study of transitivity variations of light verbs (Jiang et al. [2]) and follows the established null hypothesis in language changes that peripheral varieties tend to be more conservative.

We introduce EVALution 2.0, a simplified Mandarin dataset for the evaluation of Vector Space Models. We take a psycholinguistics-based methodology through the use of a verbal association task, which differs from previous datasets that use corpus and ontology to construct word relation pairs. Semantic neighbors were created for 100 target words and surprisingly, to which participants produced 1129 word relation pairs. In a separate agreement-rating task, only 62 pairs showed were rejected. The methodology has proven to be a way to expand the existing resources quickly while maintaining a high level of quality.

This paper presents a Named Entity Recognition (NER) system for Chinese classic novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties using the Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) method. An annotated corpus of four influential vernacular novels produced during this period is used as both training and testing data. In the experiment, three novels are used as training data and one novel is used as the testing data. Three sets of features are proposed for the CRFs model: (1) baseline feature set, that is, word/POS and bigram for different window sizes, (2) dependency head and dependency relationship, and (3) Wikipedia categories. The F-measures for these four books range from 67% to 80%. Experiments show that using the dependency head and relationship as well as Wikipedia categories can improve the performance of the NER system. Compared with the second feature set, the third one can produce greater improvement.

Mandarin “A+Yi(one)+X, B+Yi(one)+Y” construction has multiple constructional meanings encoded by the same syntactic form. We study the conditions for selection and/or preference of constructional meanings of this construction in this paper. Study of corpus data showed that POS and semantic roles of A/B X/Y cannot reliably predict different constructional meanings. We further show that conditions that can predict the differences in constructional meaning are the event structures of A and B’s, as well as referential relationship between “Yi(one)+X”and “Yi(one)+Y”. The context and logic relationship between A and B can also influence the constructional meaning.

This paper examines both synaesthetic and conceptual metaphors of BITTERNESS and PAIN in Chinese and English. In terms of synaesthetic metaphor, BITTERNESS is more versatile than PAIN, as the former can be transferred to more sensory domains than the latter. Regardless of the sensory domains, the synaesthetic metaphor basically inherits the negative polarity in both Chinese and English. Regarding conceptual metaphor, both BITTERNESS and PAIN exhibit noticeable cross-linguistic differences. Specifically, EFFORT IS BITTERNESS and INTENSITY IS PAIN are attested in Chinese, while EFFORT IS PAIN and INTENSITY IS BITTERNESS are in operation in English. Whenever EFFORT is targeted, the expression at issue obliterates the negative sense of BITTER and PAIN, probably because the concept of “effort” is cross-culturally positive.

In sentiment analysis, polarity shifting means to shift the polarity of a sentiment clue. Compared with other natural language processing (NLP) tasks, to extract polarity shifters (polarity shifting patterns) in corpora is a challenging one, since the polarity shifters sometimes are very subtle, which often invalidates fully automatic approaches. In this paper, aiming to extract polarity shifters that invert or attenuate polarity, we use a semi-automatic approach based on pattern mining. The approach can greatly reduce the human annotating cost and cover as many polarity shifters as possible. We tested this approach on domain corpora, and encouraging experimental results are reported.

Being a canonical opposite pairing means it has a higher frequency in collocation and a wider distribution in syntactic frames. Based on Chinese GigaWord Corpus, this study questions the previous findings from English and other languages that “canonicity is a gradable property” (Jones et al. 2012), and explores, in Chinese, whether for each opposite conceptual pair there is a canonical pairing, and, the characteristics of opposite parings.

Previous studies on the categorization of Chinese adverbs have not come to a conclusive end, in part due to their varying criteria. While many studies have focused on subcategories of adverbs, the boundaries of the subcategories themselves are not clear. As a result, there is still no clear picture where Chinese adverbs stand in the whole field of Chinese semantics. In addition, not enough features have been explored in order to derive highly cohesive categories. In this paper, we present a new categorization framework for Chinese adverbs. Firstly, four coarse-grained categories are proposed according to the semantic structures of sentences, including the proposition, modalities, aspect and other meaning components. Then, several semantic and syntactic features are used to further divide the four categories into more than ninety finer-grained subcategories. Based on the new framework, we find that adverbs in the same category function in similar ways, both semantically and syntactically.

Synaesthesia is a well-known phenomenon, both as a neural disorder (The Man Who Tasted Shapes) and a device for linguistic metaphors. The neural basis of synaesthesia is characterized by sensation stimuli or cognition that induces a different cognition spontaneously and involuntarily. Sensation verbs are rich and varied in the Chinese lexicon, but so far there has been no extensive study concerning their use in linguistic synaesthesia. To address this gap in the literature, this study will investigate linguistic synaesthesia using the visual verbs “kan4 (look)” and “jian4 (look)”. Moreover, a discussion on semantic mappings and metaphors will be presented.

The semantic factor is considered to play an important role in deciding the word order of compounds. Previous studies on Chinese opposites generally agree with the Pollyanna Principle, but do not offer detailed statistical analysis, especially for opposite compounds. In this paper, we go through 315 opposite pairs in Sinica Corpus and the result shows that, for Chinese opposite compounds, prosodic factor and cultural hierarchy are also crucial for ordering.