Syntactic and Semantic Discrepancies among the Verbs for 'kill' in English, Chinese and Thai

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.