Fine-Grained Lexical Semantic Representations And Compositionally-Derived Events In Mandarin Chinese

Current lexical semantic representations for natural language applications view verbs as simple predicates over their arguments. These structures are too coarse-grained to capture many important generalizations about verbal argument structure. In this paper, I specifically defend the following two claims: verbs have rich internal structure expressible in terms of finer-grained primitives of meaning, and at least for some languages, verbal meaning is compositionally derived from these primitive elements. I primarily present evidence from Mandarin Chinese, whose verbal system is very different from that of English. Many empirical facts about the typology of verbs in Mandarin cannot be captured by a “flat” lexical semantic representation. These theoretical results hold important practical consequences for natural language processing applications.