Verb Polysemy and Compounding Productivity in Chinese: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

In Mandarin Chinese, monosyllabic verbs (V characters) are particularly rich in polysemy and morphologically productive in compounding. The senses of V characters are usually associated with their related compounds. This chapter will examine the relationship between the polysemy and compounding productivity of V characters both qualitatively and quantitatively. A morphological phenomenon called “compounding-abbreviation loop” has been proposed as a way to enrich the polysemy of V characters. It has been argued that the compounding-abbreviation loop accounts for the strong semantic ties between V characters and their related compounds. Supporting this view, this chapter will present a quantitative study that examined the association between the polysemy and compounding productivity of V characters. The data on the characters, compounds, and word senses used in the study were collected from the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, Thesaurus of Chinese Words 同義詞詞林 Tóngyìcí Cílín, and the Chinese dictionary 漢語大詞典 Hanyu Da Cidian. The results showed a positive correlation between the mean number of senses and the number of related compounds.