An English-Chinese Comparative Study Of Semantic Roles Of Clause Elements In A Corpus Of English Children’s Readers

Communication across languages is possible because there are not only corresponding words in different languages but also corresponding semantic roles of clause elements. Therefore, a correct understanding of semantic roles is essential for children to acquire a language. Yet there seems to be hardly any comprehensive and systematic study of the semantic roles children who have basically acquired English face in their reading. Linguists have proposed various sets of semantic roles with different levels of fineness, some of which have been applied to the annotation of large corpora. However, for lack of unified criteria that are generally acceptable, existing annotation systems are rather subject in defining and identifying semantic roles. Besides, as they have been developed for annotating monolingual corpora, they are not suitable for bilingual parallel corpora.The present study takes Good English1-3as representative of English readers for4-6year-olds in English-speaking countries and annotates the semantic roles of obligatory clause elements of both the English texts and their Chinese translations in order to find out what semantic roles the two corpora contain and the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in this aspect. The author defines semantic role as "the role that a clause element plays in the predication denoted by the verb" Four types of predication are distinguished:EXISTENTIAL, POSSESSIVE, JUDGEMENTAL and EVENTIVE as well as28semantic roles.This study reveals that EXISTENTIAL predications account for1%of all the clauses, POSSESSIVE3%, JUDGEMENTAL21%, and EVENTIVE75%; the most common semantic roles for subject are ACTOR (28%) and AGENT (26%), the most uncommon one is PATIENT (1%); the most common role for object is PATIENT (45%), the most uncommon one is CONTENT (1%); the most common role for complement is GOAL (41%), the rarest ones are DIRECTION, MANNER and TIME. INSTRUMENT, a semantic role frequently discussed in literature, is not found as an obligatory clause element. In terms of predication types and semantic roles, the total matching rate between English and Chinese is88%. Mismatches are found in all four predication types:EXISTENTIALs14%, mainly with English there-existentials v.s. Chinese appear-disappear existentials; POSSESSIVEs14%, mainly with English existential possessions v.s. Chinese existentials; JUDGEMENTALs15%, mainly with clauses containing get and dummy it finding no Chinese counterparts; and EVENTIVEs11%, mainly with the clause patterns of the English verbs mismatching their Chinese counterparts. The clause pattern SPOC in POSSESSIVE is not found in the corpus. For JUDGEMENTALs, the clause elements take the forms of noun phrases, semi-verbs or adpositon-complement phrases, but not clauses.