Event Structure of Transitive Verb: A MARVS perspective
This work provides a detailed linguistic analysis for researchers in semantics, but it is incremental as it extends an existing theory to specific verbs.
The study applied the MARVS theory to analyze the event structures of four transitive verbs in Mandarin Chinese, identifying specific modules and attributes for each verb.
Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) is a theory of the representation of verbal semantics that is based on Mandarin Chinese data (Huang et al. 2000). In the MARVS theory, there are two different types of modules: Event Structure Modules and Role Modules. There are also two sets of attributes: Event-Internal Attributes and Role-Internal Attributes, which are linked to the Event Structure Module and the Role Module, respectively. In this study, we focus on four transitive verbs as chi1(eat), wan2(play), huan4(change) and shao1(burn) and explore their event structures by the MARVS theory.