Mandarin Semantic Primitives
Résumé
The approach taken in this analysis of Mandarin is that only a small subset of
lexemes and expressions of a natural spoken language serves as a potential 'key ' or
metalanguage in directly representing basic conceptual building blocks, a framework
of semantic analysis advocated and developed by Anna Wierzbicka (1972 , 1980,
1985, 1989a , 1989b , 1991) and Cliff Goddard (1989 , 1991). In the main section of
the paper, the eight classes of primitives proposed by Goddard and Wierzbicka
are discussed in turn for Mandarin : (1 ) substantives and pronouns; (2 )
mental predicates; (3) determiners and quantifiers; (4 ) actions and events; (5) metapredicates;
(6) time and place; (7) meronymy and taxonomy; and (8) evaluators and
descriptors. Most of the data are elicited fo r th e purpose of creating the set of test
sentences wit h th e primitives in thei r canonical contexts i n order to provid e a
comparative corpus for this volume. Where possible, I have supplemented thi with
data from transcriptions of recorded conversations and narratives to add utterances
from natural contexts . The data are transcribed using the pinyïn system officially
adopted in China in 1958 which is used as an ancillary writing system to the character
script.