A Synchronous Corpus-Based Study of Verb-Noun Fluidity in Chinese

The problem of verb-noun categorial ambiguity is critical and relatively unique for non-inflectional languages, especially Chinese. We consider the verb-noun categorial fluidity a continuum and any categorial shift a transitional process. A synchronous corpus-based study was conducted to compare the phenomenon with respect to news texts collected from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taiwan. It was found that about 15% of the verbs in the Hong Kong and Taiwan texts were undergoing the verb-noun categorial shift; whereas Beijing texts had more than 18% of the verbs undergoing this shift. The results also have important implications on various natural language applications, including lexicography, part-of-speech tagging of Chinese, as well as other natural language processing tasks.