On Semantic Category of Speech-Act Verbs in Modern Chinese - With a Case of qing(please)

摘要

As one of the speech-act verbs in modern Chinese, qing is polysemous, which poses a thorny problem for natural language processing in terms of its sense demarcation and its semantic valence. This article begins with its dictionary definition, and then with the help of such theories as Synset-Allolexeme Theory and Lexical Categorization Theory, categorizes meanings of qing as qing_1, qing_2, qing_3, and qing_4 on the basis of genuine materials. This article also explores both the semantic senses and semantic valence of each category of qing.