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A Study on Chinese Nominal Predicate Sentences From the Perspective of Cognitive Grammar
LU He, GAO Wencheng
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.10.008
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Mandarin Chinese permits nominal expressions to function directly as predicates, as in “jintian xingqisan” (today Wednesday), “ta da yanjing” (she big eyes), and “man wuzi ren” (a roomful of people). This challenges accounts that treat verbal predication as obligatory. Drawing on Langacker’s notions of autonomy and dependence, profiling, grounding, and reference-point organization, this paper analyzes five types of nominal predicate clauses in CCL Corpus of Modern Chinese contexts: identity classification, temporal anchoring, scalar specification, property description, and spatial-existential predication. The analysis argues that nominal predicates remain nominal in lexical content but acquire a dependent function in construction, classifying, locating, quantifying, characterizing, or situating the subject. An overt copula is unnecessary when the relation is recoverable from constructional meaning, discourse grounding, and shared knowledge. These sentences thus illustrate the interaction of topic-comment organization, zero marking, and cognitive economy.
Chinese nominal predicate sentence, Cognitive Grammar, grounding, constructional meaning
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, October 2026, Vol. 16, No. 10, 844-848
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