Alternation Across Semantic Fields: A Study on Mandarin Verbs of Emotion

This paper explores possible co-relations between lexical semantics and morpho-syntactic structures. We first examine a consistent dichotomy among verbs of emotion, which was first observed for verbs of happiness by Tsai et al. [1998]. It is shown that the dichotomy can be determined based on the criterion of whether a verb is a VV compound or not. The linguistic contrasts observed include: the grammatical functions of a verb as well as their distribution, the selectional restrictions the verbs impose as an adjunct, a verb’s occurrences in imperative and evaluative constructions, its actionsart, and its transitivity. We will show that the overt morpho-syntactic contrasts are due to lexical event structure properties. The description of a state (of emotion) can focus on how the state comes to be (i.e., the inchoative state) or on the being of the state (i.e., the homogeneous state). Since VV compounding has the semantic function of referring to the generic properties of the set of event tokens, it is natural for VV compounding to be chosen as the morpho-syntactic representation of homogeneity.