Abstract:

The category of event is a complex category fused by two basic categories of thing and action. From the perspective of crosslanguage, the category of event is a marked map, and it is coded by a word rather than a sentence. However, lots of unmarked event nouns can be found even in morphological languages, and the ambiguity of event nouns is also a common linguistic phenomenon. So the function standard of distribution is still the vital method of defining event nouns in morphological languages. Comparing the existing frameworks of mandarin Chinese and the ones in morphological languages, we can find that their common core function is event structure realization of nouns. So the method defining Chinese event nouns can be named the Event Structure Diagnosis. Different weights can be added on these frameworks according to their priority differences. These differently weighted frameworks can serve as standards for defining the potential members of event nouns according to word senses. In this way, a mandarin Chinese event noun classification system can be roughly constructed.