From Collocation to Event Information: The Case of Mandarin Verbs of Discussion

The importance of deciphering lexical knowledge, especially the eventive information encoded on verbs, has been highly recognized and various approaches have been proposed to represent lexical information that plays a crucial role in grammatical realization. In this paper, a subset of Mandarin verbs of communication —verbs of discussion—is explored in detail, with reference to the semantic properties characteristic of the whole class. While quantitative NLP approaches might tend to overlook some semantic details, it is shown that a corpus-based, contrastive analysis of near-synonyms can be most useful in extracting lexical information that is critical in differentiating verbs.