Lexical differentiation in Mandarin Chinese sensory lexicon

How human beings perceive the world through our five main physiological senses and how such perception is encoded in the human languages are intriguing yet challenging in linguistic studies. Considering uneven studies of Chinese sensory language compared to other Indo-European languages, this study takes the initiative to replicate Strik Lievers and Winter (2018)’s perspective of investigating sensory lexemes distribution across lexical categories, to examine the relationship between Mandarin Chinese sensory lexicon in terms of their parts-of-speech and the five senses. A list of 1,369 sensory related lexemes with annotated lexical categories and sensory modalities were compiled. The quantitative method was used to explore the correlation between sensory modalities and part-of-speech distributions. Chi-squared test yielded a significant result with the p-value<0.05, suggesting a strong relationship between these two categories and the existence of asymmetrical distributions in lexical categories among different senses. In addition, correspondence analysis was conducted, and the result suggests vision is the only sense associated with a high proportion of verbs, taste and touch are more associated to adjectives, while smell and hearing are found preferring nouns. But given there exists a large amount of “deverbal” nouns in auditory sense (occupying 58% of all the nouns), it suggests hearing tends to be more ‘verby’ instead of ‘nouny’. In view of the time-dependency features associated with different lexical categories (see Givón, 1979; 2001[1984]), this study goes further to discuss the ‘time-variant’ in each sense. We adopt Huang (2015; 2016)’s ontological endurant/perdurant dichotomy in which a concept which can be defined independent of time is endurant, and a concept which must be defined dependent of time is perdurant. Since some formal syntacticians suggested lexical categories could be decomposed to +N/+V features, i.e., nouns as [+N, -V], verbs as [-N, +V] and adjectives as [+N, +V] (Haegeman 1994, p.146), Huang (2016) claims that +N feature stands for endurant properties, and +V feature stands for perdurant properties. By decomposing words and linking such features to endurant/perdurant dichotomy, it is possible for us to suggest a ‘sensory endurant/perdurant scale’, on which smell is seen as the most endurant sense, touch and taste are in the middle, while hearing and vision are viewed as the most perdurant modalities.