Reframing Chinese verb patterns through a chunk-based approach: a case study of legal judgments

• Chunk–based approach linking lexicogrammar and collostruction in Chinese verbs. • Predicate chunk–based approach enables precise extraction of Chinese verb patterns. • Collostructional analysis quantifies verb–pattern association strengths in context. • Chinese legal judgments show a strong preference for pre-verbal verb patterns. • Distinct pattern preferences emerge across existential, saying, and action verbs. The interaction between lexis and grammatical patterns, known as lexicogrammar, plays a crucial role in describing a word’s usage characteristics and profiles. Lexico-grammatical pattern extraction and further analysis are essential for understanding language features and usage characteristics, particularly in analyzing how words function within specific textual contexts. Given that verbs constitute the syntactic and semantic core of Chinese sentences, investigating verb patterns is crucial, as various grammatical elements frequently co-occur with verbs to form stable and high-frequency patterns, making such research both feasible and necessary for a comprehensive understanding of Chinese linguistic structures and meaning construction. Previous methods of pattern extraction largely rely on linear concordance analyses, which often fail to capture deeper structural relationships, resulting in inaccurate or misleading collocations. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces a chunk-based annotation approach using Chinese legal judgments as a representative case study. We developed a framework to segment predicate chunks into finer-grained sub-chunks, thereby enabling precise extraction of verb patterns. Employing collostructional analysis, we quantitatively assessed the association strength between verbs and their grammatical patterns and identified preferred verb patterns. The findings demonstrate a strong preference for pre-verbal patterns, aligning closely with genre-specific requirements for factual precision and contextual specificity in legal texts. Additionally, distinct pattern preferences emerge across various semantic verb categories (e.g., existential, saying, action), providing empirical insights into the syntactic and functional dimensions of Chinese verb usage. This research contributes to corpus-based studies on the interaction between lexical items and grammatical patterns, and deepens the understanding of the factors influencing verb usage in Chinese.