The “v + n” compound nouns in Chinese: from the perspective of Generative Lexicon Theory

Abstract

In Chinese, a verbal morpheme and a nominal morpheme can form a variety of compound words, such as compound verbs, compound nouns, compound adjectives etc. Among them, the ‘v + n’ compound nouns are not only abundant in quantity, but also rich in meaning. The verbal morphemes show the strong capacity of word-formation. In this paper, we selected nearly 2800 disyllabic “v + n” compound nouns from the “Modern Chinese Dictionary (Sixth Edition)”as the research object and studied their main semantic mode and semantic combination mechanism. We found that the functions of the verbal morphemes were downgraded from predication into identification, and their qualia structure exhibited complex and heterogeneous diversity. The referential transparency of this type of compound nouns is very high, but the semantics is not always simple additive relation and the semantic transparency of part of this type of compound nouns is not high.