ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a qualia-structure descriptive system for Chinese nouns (QSDS@noun). QSDS@noun formalises relevant syntactic, semantic knowledge in relation to certain lexical items, including: their common combinations, conventional collocations with other words and semantic interpretations in real-world texts. Nouns are combined with their qualia roles into sentences or constructions by a set of syntactic formats. QSDS@noun becomes a transparent, intuitive syntactic-semantic interface on which world knowledge and linguistic knowledge are integrated. QSDS@noun and Qualia-Structure (QS) can be adopted to analyse and explain a number of complex syntactic, semantic phenomena in Chinese, including nominal valency, the topic-comment construction, and nominal metaphor. QSDS@noun represents the conceptual basis of the valent structure in the QS framework, in which different relations in the valent structure are clarified by different qualia roles. QSDS@noun sheds light on the topic-comment construction and provides a formal framework to represent its structural mechanism.
