Abstract
Hearing or auditory sense has particularly strong temporality and dynamicity among the five sense modalities. Taking an ontological and cognitive perspective, this study examines hearing nouns in terms of their qualia values and eventive natures utilizing Generative Lexicon Theory and the basic ontological concept of endurant and perdurant. It is shown that linguistic representation of auditory perception related items shares strong perdurant properties. This is manifested by large proportion of event nouns, deverbal nominals and coerced event episode interpretation of hearing nouns. In addition, interpretation of classifiers of the default hearing nouns, 聲音 sheng1yin1 ‘sound’, further supports the eventive nature of the auditory modality. A sound referring noun phrase typically has an eventive reading even when it is enumerated with a classifier. In this context, the meaning refers to the frequency of sound-making events instead of the counting of sound content.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Previously named ‘lexical inheritance structure’ in Pustejovsky (1995).
- 2.
Accessed at https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/corpora/.
- 3.
This type of noun is further classified as ‘Natural Complex Types’ in Wang and Huang (2012), but since we are following the three basic types initially proposed by Pustejovsky, this type will still be annotated as ‘Complex Types’ in this study.
- 4.
Only those performing arts with oral sounds can be selected. For example, 郭德綱 (GUO Degang) is known as a crosstalk comedian and crosstalk relies on producing speech sounds when it is performed.
References
Ahrens, K. 1999. The mutability of noun and verb meaning. Chinese Language and Linguistics 5: 335–371.
Ahrens, K., and C.-R. Huang. 2016. Classifiers. In A reference grammar of Chinese, ed. C.-R. Huang and D.X. Shi, 169–197. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bach, E. 1981. On time, tense, and aspect: An essay in English metaphysics. In Radical pragmatics, ed. P. Cole, 63–81. New York: Academic Press.
Chen, I.-H., Q.Q. Zhao, Y.F. Long, Q. Lu, and C.-R. Huang. 2019. Mandarin Chinese modality exclusivity norms. PLoS One 14 (2).
Gentner, D. 1982. Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. Technical Report No. 257, Center for the Study of Reading, Illinois University, Urbana, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hong, J.-F., and C.-R. Huang. 2018. Near synonym analysis of Sheng and Yin: The relation between meaning and cognitive concepts. In Frontier of research in Chinese and Tibetan—A festschrift for Prof. Pang-Hsin Ting on his eightieth, ed. D.A. Ho, Y.M. Yao, Z.M. Chen, J.T. Sun, and H.N. Zhang, 256–278. Beijing, China: Social Science Academic Press.
Huang, C.-R. 2015. Notes on Chinese grammar and ontology: The endurant/perdurant dichotomy and Mandarin D-M compounds. Lingua Sinica 1 (1): 1–22.
Huang, C.-R. 2016. Endurant vs Perdurant: Ontological Motivation for Language Variations. Paper presented at the 30th Pacific Asia conference on language, information and computation, Seoul Korea.
Huang, C.-R., and K. Ahrens. 2003. Individuals, kinds and events: Classifier coercion of nouns. Language Sciences 25 (4): 353–373.
Huang, C.-R., S.-K. Hsieh, J.-F. Hong, Y.-Z. Chen, I.-L. Su, Y.-X. Chen, and S.-W. Huang. 2010. Chinese wordnet: Design, implementation, and application of an infrastructure for cross-lingual knowledge processing. Journal of Chinese Information Processing 24 (2): 14–23.
Kilgarriff, A., B. Vít, B. Jan, J. Miloš, K. Vojtěch, M. Jan, R. Pavel, and S. Vít. 2014. The sketch engine: Ten years on. Lexicography 1 (1): 7–36.
Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, UK: MIT Press.
Pustejovsky, J. 2005. Introduction to generative lexicon. Manuscript.
Pustejovsky, J., and E. Jezek. 2008. Semantic coercion in language: Beyond distributional analysis. Rivista di Linguistica 20 (1): 181–214.
Simons, P., and J. Melia. 2000. Continuants and Occurrents. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 74: 59–92.
Song, Z.Y. 2018. Shengcheng ciku lilun de zuixin fazhan [Latest development of generative lexicon theory]. In Shengcheng ciku lilun yu Hanyu yanjiu [The generative lexicon: Studies on the Chinese language], ed. Z.Y. Song and C.-R. Huang, 99–123. Beijing, China: The Commercial Press.
Song, Z.Y., and C.-R. Huang (eds.). 2018. Shengcheng ciku lilun yu Hanyu yanjiu [The generative lexicon: Studies on the Chinese language]. Beijing, China: The Commercial Press.
Strik Lievers, F., and B. Winter. 2017. Sensory language across lexical categories. Lingua 204: 45–61.
Vendler, Z. 1957. Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review 66 (2): 143–160.
Wang, S. 2013. Semantics of event nouns. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.
Wang, S., and C.-R. Huang. 2012. Type construction of event nouns in Mandarin Chinese. In Proceedings of the 26th Pacific Asia conference on language, information and computation, 582–591, Bali, Indonesia (2012).
Yuan, Y. 2014. On a descriptive system of qualia structure of Chinese nouns and its application in parsing complex Chinese grammatical phenomena. Contemporary Linguistics 16 (1): 31–48.
Zhao, Q.Q., J.J. Xiong, and C.-R. Huang. 2019. Tonggan, yinyu yu renzhi: tonggan xianxiang zai Hanyu zhong de xitongxing biaoxian yu yuyanxue jiazhi [Synaesthesia, metaphor and cognition: systematic representations of synaesthesia in Chinese and its linguistic values]. Zhongguo Yuwen [Studies of the Chinese Language] 2: 240–253.
Zhong, Y., S.C. Dong, and C.-R. Huang. 2018. Lexical differentiation in Mandarin Chinese sensory lexicon. Paper presented at the 10th European association of Chinese linguistics annual meeting (EACL-10), Sept, Milan, Italy.
Acknowledgements
This research work is supported by Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Research Grant sponsored by the National Taiwan Normal University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project No.: RG012-D-16).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Peking University Press
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zhong, Y., Huang, CR. (2020). Eventivity and Auditory Modality: An Onto-Cognitive Account of Hearing Nouns in Mandarin Chinese. In: Su, Q., Zhan, W. (eds) From Minimal Contrast to Meaning Construct. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9239-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9240-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)