The semantic composition of event counting expressions within nominals in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Event counting expressions like three times are often thought of as adverbial modifiers of a verbal projection. This study establishes and analyzes an apparently related but puzzling phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese whereby an event counting expression consisting of a numeral and an event classifier is introduced within a nominal syntactic argument to a verb, that also contains a thematic nominal. Closely examining the relevant interpretive properties, I show that such constituents are able to express counts of events independently of composition with the verb. Moreover, the phenomenon should be understood to reflect a close syntax-semantic parallelism between event classifiers and individual classifiers in Mandarin Chinese: while individual classifiers express counts of individuals introduced by the following noun, event classifiers facilitate counts of events associated with such individuals (cf. Deng 2013). This means that the thematic nominal inside of the event classifier phrase must be interpreted as an event description on its own. These findings lend empirical support to the idea of total thematic separation and related proposals (Schein 1993 among others).