A Semantic Approach To “Laugh” Verbs In Contemporary Chinese

In the lexical study of contemporary Chinese, the studies of verbs, especially the verb subclasses have been concerned by Chinese scholars. As one of verb subclasses, “laugh” verbs are commonly adopted in Chinese, playing an important role in daily communication. In recent years, many researches are carried out on “laugh” verbs which make great achievements. However, the researches are not profound in the aspect of semantics which wait for further studies. Through systematically revealing semantic strucure of “laugh” verbs in contemporary Chinese, the thesis not only enriches the methods of analyzing verb subclasses in theoretical research, but also helps language learners expand their vocabularies and improve themselves in the application of “laugh” verbs in the field of TCSL(teaching Chinese as a foreign language).The research explores the semantic structure of “laugh” verbs from the aspects of semantic features and thematic roles. Firstly, with referring to the previous study and characteristics of “laugh” verbs, 66 verbs are selected in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary(the 5th edition). Besides, in the analysis of semantic features, the features of “laugh” verbs are classified into notional features and affiliated features which are illustrated with examples. Afterwards, in the light of the thematic roles of “laugh” verbs, through adopting the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL) corpus, the thematic role grids, syntactic arrangements and co-occurrences of thematic roles in sentences are discussed.Based on the research, the thesis concludes that in “laugh” verbs, the force intensity of notional features is proportional to the volume level, and in affiliated features, the cause features, mood features and manner features interact with each other. In addition, a mapping relation between thematic roles and syntactic components is discovered in sentences, but this relation is not absolute due to the differences of sentence structures.