本文從語料庫語言學的角度研究當代台灣華語口語中「人」、「事(情)」、「東西」三個概述名詞的使用。我們專門探討這三個詞與其他語言成分共同出現的情形。我們的調查顯示這三個詞對於指涉的區辨程度各有不同傾向。每個詞在與其他語言成分共同組成習語或半固定句式的程度上也不同。這三個詞的使用也呈現出語言互動如何驅動並強化意義建構的制式化。

This is a corpus-based study of general nouns, ren ‘people’, shi(qing) ‘matter’, and dongxi ‘thing, object’, as they are used in spoken Mandarin in contemporary Taiwan. Our examination focuses on the co-occurrences and collocations of these general nouns with other linguistic elements. Our investigation shows that the three lexical items display different tendencies in designating referential specificity. They also manifest different extents to which each can form fixed expressions and stabilized constructions with other linguistic elements. Finally, the behavior of these general nouns also demonstrates how language use in interaction motivates and reinforces the conventionalization of meaning construction.