People, Things and Stuff: General Nouns in Spoken Mandarin

This is a corpus-based study of general nouns, ren ‘people’, shi(qing) ‘matter’, and dongxi ‘thing, object’, as they are used in spoken Mandarin in contemporary Taiwan. Our examination focuses on the co-occurrences and collocations of these general nouns with other linguistic elements. Our investigation shows that the three lexical items display different tendencies in designating referential specificity. They also manifest different extents to which each can form fixed expressions and stabilized constructions with other linguistic elements. Finally, the behavior of these general nouns also demonstrates how language use in interaction motivates and reinforces the conventionalization of meaning construction.