De-verbalization and Nominal Categories in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-driven study in both Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin

1 De-verbalization and Nominal Categories in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-driven study in both Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin Jiajuan Xiong Chu-Ren Huang Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong Hong Kong jiajuanx@gmail.com churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk 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. 1 Introduction This paper starts from examining two newly- emergent uses in Mainland Mandarin (MM) and Taiwan Mandarin (TM) and moves to the investigation of de-verbalization in Mandarin Chinese in section 2. In section 3 and 4, we probe into the grammatical behaviors and the ontological foundations of various nominal categories, respectively. 1.1 [gezhong ‘all kinds of’ + VP/AP] in MM The function of classifiers is to modify nouns. However, it is found that the generic kind classifier zhong ‘kind’ (Huang 2015), in the form of gezhong ‘each-kind; all kinds of’, is frequently utilized to modify a verb phrase or an adjectival phrase in the social media. This use is noted as [gezhong ‘all kinds of’ + VP/AP]. The following examples (1) – (3) are extracted from baidu website for the sake of illustration.1 (1) Meng bao men bei wangyou ge adorable child PL BEI cyber-pals each zhong chengzan. CL-kind praise ‘The adorable children are praised so much by the cyber pals.’ (2) Xinwen wa wa wa, zhe yi ji haokan, news PN the one CL interesting ge zhong ma women. each CL-kind abuse us ‘This episode of News Wawawa is especially interesting. It abuses us in various ways.’ (3) Dang ma de dou zheyang, dui haizi be mother DE all this_way to child ge zhong xihuan. each CL-kind like ‘Mothers are always like this. They like their children in various ways/so much.’ 1.2 [ (yi ‘one’ + CL) + VP + (de) + 1 Most of the examples in this paper are corpora data, of which the sources are indicated at the end of the sentences. Specifically, SC refers to Sinica Corpus and CCL the corpus constructed by the Chinese Center of Linguistics of Peking University. PACLIC 29 431 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 431 - 438 Shanghai, China, October 30 - November 1, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Jiajuan Xiong and Chu-Ren Huang …

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