A study of manner adverbs’ sememe collocation in modern Chinese

Abstract

The characteristics of manner adverbs’ collocation are unique in modern Chinese, but they are rarely given much attention. After designing and proposing a descriptive and analytical methodological framework for these adverbs’ sememe collocation, this research takes typical manner adverbs as examples and achieves automatic semantic clustering for their collocations by using the semantic resource (A Thesaurus of Modern Chinese); then it presents an analysis of the sememe collocation features of the example words under the current framework. This study proposes that the descriptive and analytical methodological framework of sememe collocation is feasible for the semantic analysis of collocations of other word categories. Additionally, the result of the sememe collocation’s descriptive analysis can also contribute to deciding typical collocations.