This chapter introduces parts of speech (PoS) and their functions in Chinese. The PoS that are introduced include the major categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The unique category of classifiers (measure words) and the minor categories of numbers, pronouns, modal verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles are also discussed.

Chapter 14 examines several sets of person-denoting nominals that show interesting patterns in terms of how they participate in compounding and how they take arguments and modifiers in the syntax. Using a few key exemplar nominals such as ‘writer’, ‘author’, and ‘passenger’, the chapter argues that the different structures in which the nominals appear relate to whether the denotation of a given use of the nominal is fundamentally dispositional, relating to a long-term property, or fundamentally episodic, relating to a particular event or situation. It illustrates several morphological and syntactic differences which it then accounts for in terms of these semantic properties. The last part of the chapter examines NP-internal syntax and develops an account for structures involving modifiers which are marked with genitive case, and those which lack genitive marking.