I am missing the "References" as well as an e-mail address in order to get in contact with the author.

Yours, [email protected]

Note a answer, but a providing link to a paper I recently published arguing that the endurant/perdurant dichotomy is linguistically realized in Chinese, entitled: Notes on Chinese grammar and ontology: the endurant/perdurant dichotomy and Mandarin D-M compounds

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40655-015-0004-6

I thought this is an important empirical issue for ontology. I.e. if endurant/perdurant dichotomy is so fundamental, we should find linguistic evidence of it (regardless whether the grammaticalization require implicit or explicit knowledge of endurant/perdurant contrast).

An interesting example that I did not include in the paper, since it focuses on the classifier system, involves the particle de. De is the most frequent word in Chinese (roughly 3% of any modern text), and has been given many different linguistic analysis, including modifier marker, relative clause marker etc. I argue that the underlying semantic function of de is to coerce a perdurant reading because it requires that the reading of the meaning of the whole phrase to be the phrases preceding and after it.

So, the famous example of

white_flower_oil   vs. white_flower de oil

where with de, the referent must be made from white flower (perdurant, intersection of the event of made from white flower and the state of being an kind of oil); while without de, it is simply a conventionalized name (endurant).  What is interesting is that we can show it is not only grammatical but conceptual. For instance, it has been puzzling Chinese linguists why one can only say

hospital de patient;  But NOT hospital patient (without de)

while it is perfectly ok for to use de optionally for many noun phrases, such

school (de) student  

This can be easily explained in terms of the fact that (of course) speakers do not want being a patient at a hospital to be an edurant property even though linguistically both options are available.

Chu-Ren Huang

[email protected]

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40655-015-0004-6