A Comparative Study of English and Chinese Synonym Pairs : An Approach based on The Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics

The Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) is a theory of the representation of verbal semantics that is developed based on Mandarin Chinese data (Huang et al., 2000). This theory proposes two types of modules: event structure modules and role modules, as well as two sets of attributes: event-internal attributes and role-internal attributes which are linked to the event structure module and role module respectively. These module-attribute semantic representations have associated grammatical consequences. Studies in MARVS (e.g. Biq 2000) found that the composition of an event modules and its attested lexical semantic attribute(s) could be generalized to a natural semantic class. For example, the contrast between bai3 ( `set') and fang4 ( `pue) in Mandarin Chinese to do with the fact that bai3 has a roleinternal feature of [design] attached to the location role, while fang4 does not. Moreover, this contrast can be generalized across the semantic class of verbs that involve design on the focussed location role (i.e. hua4 'to paint') and those that do not (i.e. tu2 'to cover with paint, to doodle'). What we would like to determine in this paper is if similar contrasts be found in near synonyms of other languages. In particular, are event modules in other languages (such as English) organized along similar conceptual lines? In this paper, we examine this theory in light of the English data. In particular, we will look at the near synonym contrast of the verbs 'put' and 'set' based on data from the two million word sampler of the British National Corpus (BNC). To preview our results, we find that the event structure in English is slightly different from that of Chinese. In Chinese, bai3 has a role-internal feature of [design] attached to the location role, while fang4 does not. However, in English, 'put' has the roles of Agent, Theme and Location in its event structure, while 'set' has the three roles of Agent, Theme, and Proposition. Thus, conceptualizations of 'set' and 'put' in English and Mandarin have different semantic and syntactic entailments.