From Near-synonyms to Divergent Viewpoint Foci: A Corpus-based MARVS Driven Account of Two Verbs of Attention

This study attempted to construct the semantic rep-resentation of the two near-synonyms of attention, zhu4yi4 and zhuan1xin1, based on MARVS theory. Since cross-strait semantic comparison has been an important topic in lexical semantic research, we also provided a fine-grained comparison of their even-tive meanings as well as their usage variations be-tween Mainland and Taiwan. The linguistic patterns were extracted from the one billion-word GigaWord Corpus (2.0) under the interface of the Chinese Word Sketch Engine. We found that zhu4yi4 and zhuan1xin1 differ crucially in the viewpoint focus of the verbal aspect, with zhuan1xin1 focusing on the process while zhu4yi4 focusing on the resultant endpoint. The contrasts can be represented with both event structure and role internal attributes, as supported by different distributional patterns from the corpus. Besides, by shifting viewpoint perspec-tive, we accounted for the salient pattern of ‘zhu4yi4 + gained-end’ in the corpus, which is, comparing with the gain of potential loss, people find it more difficult to deal with the loss of current gain.