De-verbalization and nominal categories in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-driven study in both Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin

Jiajuan Xiong, Chu-ren Huang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publication29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015
PublisherShanghai Jiao Tong University
Pages431-438
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2015
Event29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 - Shanghai, China
Duration: 30 Oct 20151 Nov 2015

Conference

Conference29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period30/10/151/11/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Linguistics and Language

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