Abstract
Hearing or auditory sense has particularly strong temporality and dynamicity among the five sense modalities. Taking an ontological and cognitive perspective, this study examines hearing nouns in terms of their qualia values and eventive natures utilizing Generative Lexicon Theory and the basic ontological concept of endurant and perdurant. It is shown that linguistic representation of auditory perception related items shares strong perdurant properties. This is manifested by large proportion of event nouns, deverbal nominals and coerced event episode interpretation of hearing nouns. In addition, interpretation of classifiers of the default hearing nouns, 聲音 sheng1yin1 ‘sound’, further supports the eventive nature of the auditory modality. A sound referring noun phrase typically has an eventive reading even when it is enumerated with a classifier. In this context, the meaning refers to the frequency of sound-making events instead of the counting of sound content.
Keywords
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- 1.
Previously named ‘lexical inheritance structure’ in Pustejovsky (1995).
- 2.
Accessed at https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/corpora/.
- 3.
This type of noun is further classified as ‘Natural Complex Types’ in Wang and Huang (2012), but since we are following the three basic types initially proposed by Pustejovsky, this type will still be annotated as ‘Complex Types’ in this study.
- 4.
Only those performing arts with oral sounds can be selected. For example, 郭德綱 (GUO Degang) is known as a crosstalk comedian and crosstalk relies on producing speech sounds when it is performed.
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Acknowledgements
This research work is supported by Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Research Grant sponsored by the National Taiwan Normal University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project No.: RG012-D-16).
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Zhong, Y., Huang, CR. (2020). Eventivity and Auditory Modality: An Onto-Cognitive Account of Hearing Nouns in Mandarin Chinese. In: Su, Q., Zhan, W. (eds) From Minimal Contrast to Meaning Construct. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_13
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