Exploring event structures in Hanzi radicals:An ontology-based approach
Chou Faculty · Suvremena lingvistika · 2013
Shuowen Jiezi(《说文解字》) is organized according to the radical forms as semantic symbols.Characters are classified according to radicals,and their meanings cluster around the basic concept of the semantic symbol.Therefore,in this paper,we assume that Shuowen Jiezi radicals can reflect the conventionalized conceptualization when Chinese character orthography was invented.According to our analysis elaborating Generative Lexicon Theory by Pustejovsky(1995),we found that the ontology expressed by Hanzi radicals has already had the strong conceptual derivation and knowledge reasoning ability as described in the Generative Lexicon.In this study,we take as our research objects Chinese radical 艹 cao3 representing grass,and the radicals representing Five Sense Faculties in Shuowen Jiezi,namely 目 mu4(eye),耳 er3(ear),口 kou3(mouth),鼻 bi2(nose),and 舌 she2(tongue) which all belong to body partclass in SUMO concepts.In addition,we assume that semantic symbols represent basic concepts,and identify the semantic relation between each derived character and its basic concept to construct a conventionalized ontology headed by that concept.Finally,we contrast the semantic symbol generative structure for the Five Sense Faculties with the modern senses of these single-character words in the Chinese WordNet.It is observed that the same set of derivational relations applies.