Bare nouns, incorporation, and event kinds in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This article motivates and develops a compositional account for bare noun incorporation (BNI) constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin BNI constructions, taking the form of V-O compounds, exhibit a constellation of properties (e.g., obligatory narrow scope, institutionalized meaning, reduced discourse capacity, restricted modification of incorporated nominals, etc.) which are typically associated with (pseudo-)incorporated structures in other languages. However, unlike other attested (pseudo-)incorporated structures, which are mostly verbal in nature, BNI constructions can be freely used as arguments, akin to nominalized expressions. Integrating the analytical insights from both the advances in the theories of kinds (Chierchia in Nat Lang Semant 6: 339–405, 1998; Gehrke in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33: 897–938, 2015) and in the theories of incorporation (Dayal in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 29: 123–167, 2011; Schwarzs in Weak referentiality, John Benjamins, 2014), the article proposes an event kind-based analysis by treating BNI constructions as expressions of Chierchia-style kinds in the domain of events, where the (proto-typical) theme arguments instantiating the bare noun complements form part of the event kinds rather than function as independent semantic arguments to the verbs. Extending the notion of kinds from the domain of individuals to the domain of events has not only provided a motivated account of the paradoxical properties of BNI constructions which would otherwise defy formal treatment, but also bridged two lines of research previously thought to be independent of each other, viz. the semantics of kinds which are mostly confined to the domain of individuals and the semantics of events which are mostly confined to canonical verbal expressions.