Abstract
This paper probes into the issue of de-verbalization in Chinese by starting from two potential and innovative uses of de-verbalization in Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, respectively. Then, we move to the exploration of various nominal categories in Chinese, with regard to their grammatical behaviors as well as their ontological differences. Crucially, we find that nominal categories in Chinese diverge upon individualization, which can be realized along either spatial or temporal dimension, as evidenced by the application of different types of classifiers. Specifically, event nouns and deverbal nouns allow temporal individualization only, while xingwei-marked nouns are exclusively compatible with spatial individualization. By contrast, entity nouns and dongzuo-marked nouns allow both spatial and temporal individualization. Hence, individualization is the key to our understanding of nominal categories in Chinese.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 |
Publisher | Shanghai Jiao Tong University |
Pages | 431-438 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2015 |
Event | 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 - Shanghai, China Duration: 30 Oct 2015 → 1 Nov 2015 |
Conference
Conference | 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | China |
City | Shanghai |
Period | 30/10/15 → 1/11/15 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Artificial Intelligence
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Linguistics and Language