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Part of
The Typology of Physical Qualities
Edited by Ekaterina Rakhilina, Tatiana Reznikova and Daria Ryzhova
[Typological Studies in Language 133] 2022
► pp. 269–288

Chapter 9
Lexical typology of Mandarin Chinese qualitative features

| Russian State University for the Humanities

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.

Keywords: Mandarin Chinese, lexicography, heavy, hard, smooth, synonyms
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.absence of irregularities on the surface: Typological expectations
  • 2.hard: Literal and figurative meanings
  • 3.heavy: Diagnosing oppositions within literal meanings through figurative ones
  • 4.Applying typological data to lexicology
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Literature
Published online: 25 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.133.09kho
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