Adjectival Modification to Nouns in Mandarin Chinese: Case Studies on “cháng+noun” and “adjective+tú shū gu n”

Adjectival Modification to Nouns in Mandarin Chinese: Case Studies on “cháng+noun” and “adjective+tú shū guǎn” ∗ Shan WANG, Chu-Ren HUANG Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University wang.shan@polyu.edu.hk, churen.huang@inet.polyu.edu.hk Abstract. This paper studies the adjectival modification to nouns in Mandarin Chinese based on selective binding. The main findings include: ⑴An adjective can select different types of head nouns as arguments and an adjective may modify an individual or an event. ⑵The qualia structure of a noun helps us better understand an adjective’s selectional preference. Meanwhile, an adjective can modify multi-facet or one facet of the qualia role of a noun. ⑶ The adjacent adjective of a noun is not necessarily modifying the noun. Keywords: qualia structure, selective binding, adjectival modification to nouns 1 Introduction In a sense enumerative lexicon, every fine-grained difference will be listed. However, the meaning of an adjective is dependent on the head it modifies. Considering this, (Pustejovsky, 1995) proposed selective binding, which takes place where a lexical item or phrase operates specifically on the substructure of a phrase, without changing the overall type in the composition. (Pustejovsky, 2000) further revealed that adjectives bind into the qualia structure of nouns to select a narrow facet of the noun's meaning. For example, a large (Formal) carved (Agentive) wooden (Constitutive) useful (Telic) arrow ([Formal; Constitutive; Agentive; Telic]) illustrates the richness of the qualia structure and each adjective selects individual qualia. Moreover, (Lapata, 2001) explored polysemous adjectives whose sense changes due to the nouns they modify. The probabilistic model he proposed can provide a ranking on the possible interpretation of the adjectives. (Saint-Dizier, 1998) proposed several extensions to the telic role through analyzing the French adjective “bon”. (Lenci, et al., 2000) extended the possible qualia role values to express fine-grained distinctions between semantic types. These studies give us a general idea of the behavior of adjectival modification to nouns and the way of extending qualia structure. However, no previous research on adjectival modification based on selective binding has been conducted regarding Mandarin Chinese. The goal of our research is to find out the interaction between adjectives and their head nouns, including: ⑴finding out the argument types an adjective can combine with; ⑵showing an adjective may modify individuals or events; ⑶looking into what qualia role of the head noun that an adjective selects. ∗ The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her important comments. Copyright 2010 by Shan WANG and Chu-Ren HUANG PACLIC 24 Proceedings 701 The following sections are organized as follows. The theoretical basis is introduced in Section 2. Then we analyze “長(cháng, long)+noun” and “adjective+圖書館(tú shū guǎ n, library)” respectively in Section 3. Finally, we summarize the paper and suggest future work in Section 4. 2 Theoretical Basis (Pustejovsky, 1995) gave an interpretation of qualia structure as follows: (1) The constitutive role is about the relation between an object and its constituents or parts. Its role values include material, weight, parts and component elements. (2) The formal role can distinguish the …

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