Coercion of Locatives in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The composition of linguistic constituents always involves the consistency of collocation, that is to say, any two constituents in a unit must be the same or similar in meaning, syntax, usage or prosody; If inconsistency appears, one part of the combination will coerce the other to change its own characteristics, or generate a new feature to achieve the goal of combination. This article studies the composition of noun-locative in Chinese and finds that different locatives may coerce nouns to produce appropriate meaning, which mainly manifests in: 1. quantity meaning of noun; 2.meaning of event noun; 3.meaning of nouny verb; 4.meaning of carrier noun’s reference; 5.meaning of container noun; 6.shape of noun; 7.meaning of polysemous noun. This article firstly introduces relevant research in generative lexicon, and then describes coercion of locatives and coercion-mechanism in Chinese, finally makes a conclusion and discusses the future work.

This research is sponsored by the national social science fund major projects “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.