Verb frame distribution and text difficulty: A corpus-based analysis of verb frames in Chinese textbooks

This study aims to explore how verb frames can potentially influence text difficulty and shed new light on text evaluation. Different from previous works focusing mostly on lexical frequencies, this paper explores semantic categories of verbs and their correlation with the difficulty levels (DLs) of textbooks. Based on a corpus of nine sets of primary school Chinese textbooks, verb-frame diversity and distribution trends by difficulty levels were examined. The results show that the diversity of verb frames has a strong positive correlation with difficulty levels. The distribution trends of the frames largely correspond with the three cognitive tiers proposed in the skill theory for language development: the sensory–motor, representational, and abstract tiers. This study introduces verb frames as a salient semantic factor in text analysis and proposes that verb-frame-related features have the potential to be utilized in the evaluation of leveled instructional materials and readability assessment.