TY - GEN
T1 - Syntactic and semantic discrepancies among the verbs for 'kill' in English, Chinese and Thai
AU - Thepkanjana, Kingkarn
AU - Uehara, Satoshi
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning 'kill' in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dead, and (B) X kill Y but Y not die. The different syntactic properties among these verbs suggest that the verbs for 'kill' in the three languages are not completely semantically equivalent. It is found that the resulting dead event of kill in English is lexically entailed but that of shā in Chinese is merely implied. Thai is a more complicated case. The verbs for 'kill' in the three languages are thus classified into different categories based on their syntactic and semantic properties.
AB - This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning 'kill' in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dead, and (B) X kill Y but Y not die. The different syntactic properties among these verbs suggest that the verbs for 'kill' in the three languages are not completely semantically equivalent. It is found that the resulting dead event of kill in English is lexically entailed but that of shā in Chinese is merely implied. Thai is a more complicated case. The verbs for 'kill' in the three languages are thus classified into different categories based on their syntactic and semantic properties.
KW - Accomplishment verb
KW - Activity verb
KW - Entailed-result verb
KW - Implied-result verb
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84863872480
SN - 9784905166009
T3 - PACLIC 24 - Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation
SP - 291
EP - 300
BT - PACLIC 24 - Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation
T2 - 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 24
Y2 - 4 November 2010 through 7 November 2010
ER -