A Typological Approach to Boundary Permeability of Noun and Verb Categories in English and Chinese

Verb/noun heterosemy in English and Chinese is a complicated issue that has perplexed linguists for a long time and it has become a hot topic for debate particularly in the past decade due to the popularity of the hypothesis that "in English verbs and nouns are discrete categories while in Chinese verbs are a subtype of noun category".Based on the frequency wordlists generated from corpora and the introduction of "boundary permeability", a parameter for linguistic typology, this paper provides a contrastive study of the noun-verb boundary crossing in English and Chinese.The results show that as far as the examined 20, 000 high-frequency words are concerned, the percentages of verb/noun heterosemous words in both English and Chinese are relatively high and close to each other, which is the same as the boundary permeability of noun and verb categories, indicating that both English and Chinese are "soft-boundary languages", with a high degree of word class flexibility.Thus, the finding does not support the abovementioned hypothesis.It is argued that inflectional morphology plays a pivotal role in bringing about the similarities between the noun-verb boundaries of the two languages.Typologically speaking, English has soft noun-verb boundary, which is close to isolating languages represented by Chinese.