Endurant vs perdurant : ontological motivation for language variations

Abstract

Modern ontology focuses on the shared structure of knowledge representation and sheds light on underling motivations of human conceptual structure. This paper addresses the issue of whether ontological structures are linguistically represented, and whether such conceptual underpinning of linguistic representation may motivate language variations. Integrating our recent work showing that the most fundamental endurant vs. perdurant ontological dichotomy is grammaticalized in Chinese and on comparable corpus based studies of variations of Chinese, I will explore the possibility that this basic conceptual dichotomy may in fact provide the motivation of changes of perspectives that underlies language variations. I will also discuss possible implication this approach has in accounting for other language changes and variations such as light verb’s argument taking, incorporation, loss of case/agreement, and English –er/-ee asymmetry. In the process, the will resolve three linguistic puzzles and eventually show that the endurant/perdurant dichotomy may in fact be the conceptual basis of the hitherto undefined +N (i.e. nouny) vs. +V (i.e. verby) features prevalent in linguistics. Based on this proposal, the variations involving various types of denominalization and deverbalization can be accounted for.