When “Natural Nouns” Surface as Verbs in Old Chinese: A Lexical Semantic Exploration

Abstract

This paper reports a study of “natural nouns” that are used as verbs in Old Chinese, focusing on the lexical semantic analysis of natural nouns based on Generative Lexicon Theory. The detailed investigation of 39 natural nouns reveals that each of them encodes information of events as various types of Conventionalized Attributes (CAs) in their qualia structures, and is verbalized by activating or exploiting a particular type of CA and realizing this CA as the core meaning of the denominal verb. The discussion shows that the relative salience of a particular CA in the qualia structure largely determines the CA’s probability of triggering N-V conversion. Moreover, there is a clear tendency in CA exploitation: CAs encoding events with human participants are much more likely to be exploited by N-V conversion than CAs encoding events without human participants. This tendency could be accounted for by people’s anthropocentric view of the world.