A Contrastive Study Of Verbs Within Event Frame Of Framenets Between English And Chinese

FrameNet is a lexical database which is designed and built theoretically based on frame semantics proposed by Charles Fillmore in 1982. It adopts corpora as its supporting language facts. It presents the conceptual frames of lexicon. In nowadays, English FrameNet, Chinese FrameNet, Japanese FrameNet, etc. have been built or are being built. Then, related language analyses by applying FrameNets are emerging, most of which are in the translating, polysemy and other study areas. The contrastive studies of words in a certain frame between two FrameNets are relatively few.On the ground of the above study status, this paper makes a contrastive study of verbs within the event frame of FrameNets between English and Chinese. Through the contrastive study, this paper intends to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the verbs within event frame of FrameNets in English and Chinese?(2) What are the differences and similarities of verbs within event frame of FrameNets between English and Chinese?(3) Is the English FrameNet classification of verbs within event frame suitable for Chinese? If not, what is the new classification of verbs within event frame in Chinese?In order to answer the above three questions correctly and reasonably, this dissertation has made the following analyses step by step: frame-based analysis, contrastive analysis and corpus-based analysis.After the above analyses, this paper finds the answers to the three questions and then obtains three major findings:(1) Verbs within event frame in English and Chinese has similarities. They are directly related to event frame and replaceable.(2) Differences of verbs within event frame between English and Chinese still exist, superficially embodied by the number of verbs in either FrameNet but actually embodied by the different ways that two FrameNets adopt to define lexical units.(3) Verbs within event frame in Chinese FrameNet should be reclassified. The Chinese verbs with similar meaning and syntactic requirement of"fa sheng"should be added to the event frame in Chinese.Finally, this study has implication for the construction of Chinese FrameNet which is under construction at present.