Adjectives Denoting Smooth Surface Texture in Chinese from a Typological Perspective

Abstract

This paper deals with adjectives describing slippery, smooth, and even surfaces in Chinese within the framework of lexical typology. The analysis is based on a typological research on language categorization of surface textures. After the discussion of semantic oppositions between the direct uses of the adjectives in question, the semantic map for Chinese is constructed and some suggestions for the further elaboration of the map based on Chinese data are made.