Qualia Relations in Metaphorical Noun-Noun Compounds

This paper aims to find out the qualia roles involved in metaphorical noun-noun compounds in Mandarin Chinese. Metaphor concerns the resemblance between things. From the perspective of qualia structure proposed by Generative Lexicon, the resemblance in metaphorical compounds can be interpreted in the way that a compound and its metaphorical component share the same quale role. A preliminary investigation shows that no matter which constituent (the modifying noun or the head noun) takes on a metaphorical meaning, only three qualia roles are found in metaphorical compounds, which are FORMAL, CONSTITUTIVE and TELIC, ordered from the most to the least frequent. AGENTIVE role is excluded. Among the values of FORMAL role, shape is the most frequent. CONSTITUTIVE role mainly relates to body part terms. TELIC role is mainly concerned with artifactual type nouns. Also, this study reveals some fine-grained distinctions between nouns of different types.