Profiling the Mandarin Physical Contact Verbs with ná, wò, chí and zhuā Using Collocational, Syntactic and Discourse Features

This study aims to provide a preliminary comparison of Mandarin Physical Contact verbs with ná ‘carry’, wò ‘grasp’, chí ‘hold’, and zhuā ‘grab’ by adopting a behavior profiling approach. Based on previous theoretical studies, the four verbs are intensively examined in terms of collocational, syntactic and discourse features in Sect. 2. Besides, the linguistic features are turned into categorical or binary features in Sect. 3 to generate the high dimensional vectors of the chosen verbs to allow multifactorial analysis to compare the subtle differences in meanings of the four verbs. The results support that wò ‘grasp’ and zhuā ‘grab’ share more semantic-syntactic similarities and ná ‘carry’ is more similar to wò ‘grasp’ and zhuā ‘grab’ cluster. Whereas chí ‘hold’ behaviors most differently from the remaining three. The study also finds out that wò ‘grasp’ and zhuā ‘grab’ cluster is differentiated from chí ‘hold’ and ná ‘carry’ cluster mostly in its syntactic features.