Durative Event: A Comparison of gan3 and qiang3

Abstract

Construction grammar [1] or compositional semantics [2] are two\r\nimportant approaches to lexical semantics. This study provides a fine-grained\r\ncomparison of 趕gan3 and 搶 qiang3 through examining both their compositional\r\nmeanings and their constructional patterns. Using Chinese WordSketch\r\n[3], [4] to extract collocational generalizations, we detail the contrasts and similarities\r\nof the uses of these two verbs based on the one billion word Chinese\r\nGigaword Corpus 1.0. Our analysis is also facilitated by the sense inventory of\r\nboth words based on the Chinese WordNet (CWN). In this study, we show that\r\nthe durative meanings of 趕gan3 and 搶 qiang3 can be extended to the nouns\r\nfollowing these two verbs, and that individual lexical meanings of the constructions\r\n[gan3/qiang3+noun] can be decomposed from the constructions. We also\r\nshow that both these verbs have related meanings even if their core meanings\r\ndo not seem to be related.