Combination of Mandarin Chinese Verb “xiě” and Nouns from the Perspective of Generative Lexicon Theory

Abstract

The semantic combination and generation do not always obey Frege’s Principle. In many cases, the meaning of the whole structure is beyond the sum of its constituents’ meaning. Under the guideline of the generative lexicon theory, through retrieving relevant corpora, this paper investigates the collocation of Chinese verb “写”(xiě, write) and nouns on the basis of qualia roles, semantic types and relevant compositional mechanisms, and illustrates that the combination of the verb “xiě” and nouns is complex. Besides, irregular objects of the verb “xiě” will be discussed. Qualia roles can provide a new explanation for the irregular objects of the verb “xiě”.

This research is sponsored by the National Social Science Fund Major Project “Chinese parataxis characteristic research and large knowledge base and corpus construction under the background of international Chinese language education” (Approval No. : 12&ZD175). We hereby express our sincere thanks.