Compositional Operations of Mandarin Chinese Verb“da3”: A Generative Lexicon Approach

Compositional Operations of Mandarin Chinese Verb“da3”: A Generative Lexicon Approach

The compositional operations of Mandarin Chinese predicates are very complex. In a highly analytic language such as Mandarin Chinese, a verb can often choose from a wide range of nouns/nominal compounds as its arguments. This paper hopes to capture a different picture of such an operation through investigating authentic corpus data of Chinese verb“打”(da3, to hit). In this study, we'd like to show that the qualia structure and type system proposed by Pustejovsky's (1995) the Generative Lexicon can affect the interpretation of verb-argument composition of“da3”, and to examine whether the compositional operations of“da3”varies under different senses with its own type selection preference. Our results show that, given that Wang and Huang (2010)'s similar investigation on the perceptual verb“kàn”(look at) indicates diverse mechanisms, the compositional operation patterns of“da3”are much like those proposed by Pustejovsky's (2008). In view of this, we also provide some limitation and future direction of this study in the last section.