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The Senses of Mandarin Deadjectival Verbs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13249))

Abstract

This work focuses on the senses of deadjectival verbs in Mandarin. We argue that the change-of-state reading of deadjectival verbs is a basic reading, rather than a derived one. Building on the interpretations of different time phrases in combination with deadjectival verbs, we propose that they belong to the aspectual class of achievements. Deadjectival verbs in Mandarin are divided into two classes: open scale-type verbs are derived from adjectival bases that are associated with an open property scale and their basic sense is [become Adjective-er]; closed scale-type verbs are derived from adjectival bases that are associated with a closed property scale and their basic sense is [become Adjective].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Abbreviations used throughout in the glosses: clf = classifier; dem = demonstrative; mode = mood; pfv = perfective; ptcl = particle.

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Correspondence to Xiaoqian Zhang .

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Zhang, X. (2022). The Senses of Mandarin Deadjectival Verbs. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06702-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06703-7

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