Compound Event Nouns of the ‘Modifier-head’ Type in Mandarin Chinese

Compound Event Nouns of the ‘Modifier-head’ Type in Mandarin Chinese Shan Wang, Chu-Ren Huang Dept. of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong wangshanstar@gmail.com, churenhuang@gmail.com Abstract. Event nouns can lexically encode eventive information. Recently these nouns have generated considerable scholarly interest. However, little research has been conducted in their morphological and syntactic structure, qualia modification, event representing feature, and information inheritance characteristics. This study has these main findings. 1) Morphologically, the modifier and the head is either free or bound morpheme. Syntactically the modifier is a nominal, adjectival, verbal or numeral morpheme, while the head is a nominal morpheme. 2) The modifier acts as a qualia role of the head. 3) All heads represent events, while the modifier is or is not an event. 4) The semantic information of a compound event noun can be inherited from the modifier or the head. Keywords: compound event noun, modifier, head, qualia structure, information inheritance 1 Introduction Event nouns are a subtype of nouns that lexically encode eventive information (Wang et al. 2011). In recent years, there has been growing interest in these nouns. Previous research in Mandarin Chinese includes patterns that they usually appear (Chu 2000; Han 2010; Ma 1995), their classifiers (Ma 1995; Wang & Zhu 2000; Wang & Huang 2011), internal and external temporal attributes (Liu 2004), semantic type system of the event noun huìyì (Wang et al. 2011). However, little attention has been devoted to the morphological and syntactic structure, qualia modification, event representing feature, and information inheritance characteristics of event nouns. Compound nouns can be divided into seven groups according to their syntactic structure: modifier-head, coordinative, predicate-object, predicate-complement, subject-predicate (topic- comment), reduplicative, and abbreviatory compound nouns (Chang 1995). This study focuses on ‘modifier-head’ compound nouns that represent events. The data in this study are from three sources. 1) The balanced modern Chinese corpus Sinica Corpus 1 . 2) The Grammatical Knowledge-base of Contemporary Chinese——A complete Specification. It is complied by (Yu et al. 2003) and includes more than 400 event nouns. 3) A few example sentences are searched online by using the search engines Google and Baidu. The following sections are organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the structure of compound event nouns of the ‘modifier-head’ type. Section 3 examines the qualia role in an event noun. Section 4 is about the event representing ability of the modifier and the head. Section 5 demonstrates event ordering. Section 6 analyses information inheritance from the modifier and the head. Finally Section 7 draws the main conclusion and suggests future work. 2 Structure of the ‘Modifier-head’ Type Event Nouns 2.1 Morphological Structure Either the modifier or the head can be a free or bound morpheme in a ‘modifier-head’ type event noun. 1) bound morpheme + free morpheme: 瑞雪 ruì-xuě ‘auspicious snow’, 劇痛 jù- 1 http://db1x.sinica.edu.tw/kiwi/mkiwi/ 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 511–518 511 tòng ‘sharp pain’. 2) free morpheme + bound morpheme: 工作餐 gōngzuò-cān ‘working lunch’, 書法展 shūfǎ-zhǎn ‘handwriting exhibition’. …

Content truncated to 500 words