The semantic type system of event nouns

An event noun is a special type of noun that lexically encodes eventive information. This paper examines a typical non-derived Mandarin Chinese noun, huìyì ‘conference; meeting’. It first establishes that huìyì is an event noun through distributional evidences. Then, it explores the semantic type system of huìyì using argument structure, event structure, and qualia structure, based on the Generative Lexicon theory (GL). The findings indicate that non-derived event nouns can represent eventive information and GL is versatile enough to represent such information encoded by nouns.