Chapter 9. Lexical typology of Mandarin Chinese qualitative features

Abstract

The chapter analyses the quality terms of Mandarin Chinese which belong to the semantic domains of heavy and hard, as well as to the subdomains of surface texture (slippery, smooth, and level). We argue that the evidence from Mandarin Chinese accords with the larger typological picture which has been gleaned from languages that are areally and genetically distant from Chinese. This similarity is firstly observed in the literal meanings, which are discussed below for the subdomains of slippery, smooth, and level. Furthermore, the Mandarin data supports the existence of stable links between literal and figurative meanings. With data from the hard domain, we show that the oppositions between the lexemes’ literal meanings determine the results of their semantic shifts. Next, we examine evidence from the heavy domain to demonstrate that a reverse analysis can be applied to predict differences in literal meanings from the differences in metaphoric uses. The concluding sections of the chapter discuss how lexico-typological data can contribute to Chinese lexicology in general.