This study analyzes the linguistic features and word formation processes of the new words in The List of New Words Used in Media 2015. The results show that the average word length of the 446 new words used in media 2015 is 3.34, with both 3- and 4-morpheme words hovering around 40% of the total and 2-morpheme words under 17%. The majority of the 2-morpheme new words parallel the Chinese syntactic patterns, such as [modifier + modified], [subject + predicate], [verb + object], and [verb + verb]. The major processes involved in the 4-morpheme word formation are blending, abbreviation, coinage, and numerical formulae. In the blending and abbreviation processes, large chunks of information are clipped off to maintain the [2+2] 4-morpheme word length pattern. In addition, like many other newly-created usages, the case of 互联网+ shows that, in language change, new words can be created through grammaticalization and various types of derivational morphology, involving the creation of new affixes.
This study offers support to usage-based studies to promote the importance of everyday language use in language development and grammaticalization. Specifically, the study presents a new construction in Beijing Mandarin Chinese that currently co-occurs with its original form, both in spoken language and written texts. The change is another instance of phono-syntactic conspiracy (Tao 2002, 2006, 2009). It starts from phonological reduction and ends in a syntactic change of a highly frequently used rhetorical question 不是…吗: ‘Isn’t it the case that….’ However, the process differs from previous findings (Bybee 2010) in that the grammaticalization process involves usage frequency as well as cognitive, cultural and social factors. The findings further support the view that language and grammar are fostered and conditioned through human communication.
This study investigates contextual variations in mitigation production (consisting of internal and external modifications) in Chinese request-making (i.e., what native Chinese speakers consider appropriate to say in hypothetical scenarios). The participants were 22 native Chinese speakers recruited from a university in China. They completed a 20-item Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT) tapping two contextual variables: power and imposition. The results show that: (1) both power and imposition exerted significant influence on the frequency of producing internal and external modifications, (2) the various internal and external modifiers were differentially associated with the two contextual variables, and (3) the preferred sequential organization of external modifications differed according to context types.
Yinwei ‘because’ is a causal conjunction or preposition indicating a causal relation between two clauses, NPs and other discourse units in Mandarin Chinese. Building on the previous research, this study examines how yinwei is used by conversational participants to organize talk and accomplish interactional tasks in Mandarin conversation. Adopting the methodologies of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study examines 11 hours of everyday Mandarin conversational data, and explores the interactional functions of yinwei-clauses. An examination of the data shows that yinwei-clauses have a variety of interactional functions in everyday Mandarin conversation. Two particular interactional functions of yinwei-clauses are accounts for a speaker’s prior action such as disagreement and strong assertion, and parentheticals providing background information related to the ongoing talk.
The meta-language unit “I say to you” is frequently heard in Mandarin Chinese conversations, and are most commonly expressed as wo gen ni shuo ‘I say to you’, wo gen ni jiang ‘I talk to you’, or wo gaosu ni ‘I tell you’, collectively termed “I-say-to-you” expressions. Quantitative investigations reveal that they are dedicated interactional resources found only in spoken conversation. By using conversation analytic methodology, further examination of their sequential trajectory shows that a core function of “I-say-to-you” expressions is to preface upcoming “delicate” matters, such as dispreferred next action, disagreement or disaffiliative turn, and other actions that may be resistance-implicative for the recipient. As a preface, “I-say-to-you” expressions can be used by the speaker to secure multi-turns space with which to gradually deliver the “delicate” matter and achieve other interactional goals.
This study reexamines Mandarin Chinese near-synonyms jian (建), zao (造), gai (蓋) ‘to build’ and their shared patterns in written and spoken genres. Three independent variables – including word length of the object NP, preverbal locative phrase, and building purpose – were tested by a logistic regression analysis (Rbrul) to account for the multiple crosscutting and interacting factors that influence language usage. Multivariate analyses show that word length and building purpose can account for the differences among these verbs in both genres. The analyses suggest that the use of jian (建) and zao (造) possess more written properties, while gai (蓋) favors the spoken genre. The current study contributes to a growing number of studies in Chinese near-synonyms by focusing on genre variation.
This paper reports a corpus-based study to examine how Chinese near-synonyms choose their typical collocates. Near-synonyms commonly misused by English-speaking learners of Chinese were selected for analysis. Results obtained from the corpora (the Chinese Internet Corpus by the University of Leeds and the Lancaster corpus of Mandarin Chinese) indicate that the collocational behaviors of the selected synonyms are constrained by their own semantic, grammatical, prosodic, stylistic and pragmatic features and hence are explainable to second/foreign learners. Findings of this study will contribute to the design of collocation/synonym dictionary as well as the instruction of collocations as a second/foreign language.
This study investigates the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the generic/episodic interpretation of Chinese sentences containing a state complement (SC) realized by an adjectival phrase (AP). It argues that the generic interpretation of such sentences is a result of the interaction of the semantics of the verb or verb phrase before 得 de (V/VP-得), the AP complement after 得 de, and pragmatic knowledge. A sentence with an AP state complement will be interpreted as generic when the V/VP-得 in the sentence expresses repeatable or sum events, and when it is determined, given one’s pragmatic knowledge and the semantics of the AP complement, that the property or state expressed by the AP can apply to a relevant event or individual in all events expressed by V/VP-得 in general.
This corpus-driven study focuses on two metaphorically used kinship terms in Modern Chinese, 父 fu ‘father’ and 母 mu ‘mother’. Under investigation are two constructions [A shi B zhi fu] ‘A is the father of B’ and [A shi B zhi mu] ‘A is the mother of B’. It is found that the figurative meanings expressed by mu (mother) are more conventionalized than those expressed by fu. The study shows that mu has higher metaphoricity, and I argue that the degree of metaphoricity of the two kinship terms in Chinese is a function both of the experiential basis of cognition in terms of universal biological phenomenon and of cultural constraints, especially Confucian thoughts, on conceptualization.
Time expressions are one of the fundamental concepts of human cognition and communication and thus have been the major concern in many linguistics, applied and developmental psycholinguistic studies (e.g. Klein & Li 2009; Li & Bowerman 1998; Shirai, Slobin, & Weist 1998). A study of time expressions in Modern Chinese (Mandarin) was conducted to explore the common patterns, system networks and realizations from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. The results indicated that (1) time expressions can be classified as extent or location; definite or indefinite, (2) within extent a distinction can be made between duration and frequency; within location there are subcategories of Absolute and Relative; of Rest and Motion (3) the forms used to realize these time elements of time are nominal groups, adverbs and pre-verbal phrases, though not all subcategories of temporal elements are realized by all these forms.
In light of the growing interest in investigating the ethnic minority Kam people in China, this paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis to explore how Kam people’s identity is represented and negotiated in spoken narratives with outside researchers. Drawing on sociolinguistic approaches to identity analysis (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006; Blommaert 2005) and membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1972a & b, 1992; Baker 2004; Fitzgerald and Housley 2015), this paper explores the relationships between Kam people’s sense of membership in their ethnic community and social practices that define this sense of membership. It focuses on the self-representation of a former Kam village head in a remote village in Southern China, Guizhou Province, and explores his way of conceptualizing being a Kam with a view to examining the relationship between his representation of the ethnic identity and the sociocultural impacts on this identity construction process.
Corpus linguistics is crucial to language education, but many corpora do not pay enough attention to curriculum and pedagogical needs. To address this issue and in view of Singapore’s unique language environment, the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language built two specialised corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore, which comprise a Written Corpus and a Spoken Corpus. The Written Corpus provides information on Chinese characters, vocabulary words and sentence structures used in written materials daily; while the Spoken Corpus provides guidelines for attainable spoken proficiency of primary school students at different academic levels. With these corpora, curriculum developers can design syllabi with greater precision on the language content and address the learning gap for Chinese language proficiency. As for teachers, an online resource platform developed based on the Written Corpus provides them with authentic materials and practical applications (such as the text grading module) as reliable tools and resources for lesson preparation and learning assessment.
This study analyzes the linguistic features and word formation processes of the new words in The List of New Words Used in Media 2015. The results show that the average word length of the 446 new words used in media 2015 is 3.34, with both 3- and 4-morpheme words hovering around 40% of the total and 2-morpheme words under 17%. The majority of the 2-morpheme new words parallel the Chinese syntactic patterns, such as [modifier + modified], [subject + predicate], [verb + object], and [verb + verb]. The major processes involved in the 4-morpheme word formation are blending, abbreviation, coinage, and numerical formulae. In the blending and abbreviation processes, large chunks of information are clipped off to maintain the [2+2] 4-morpheme word length pattern. In addition, like many other newly-created usages, the case of 互联网+ shows that, in language change, new words can be created through grammaticalization and various types of derivational morphology, involving the creation of new affixes.
This study offers support to usage-based studies to promote the importance of everyday language use in language development and grammaticalization. Specifically, the study presents a new construction in Beijing Mandarin Chinese that currently co-occurs with its original form, both in spoken language and written texts. The change is another instance of phono-syntactic conspiracy (Tao 2002, 2006, 2009). It starts from phonological reduction and ends in a syntactic change of a highly frequently used rhetorical question 不是…吗: ‘Isn’t it the case that….’ However, the process differs from previous findings (Bybee 2010) in that the grammaticalization process involves usage frequency as well as cognitive, cultural and social factors. The findings further support the view that language and grammar are fostered and conditioned through human communication.
This study investigates contextual variations in mitigation production (consisting of internal and external modifications) in Chinese request-making (i.e., what native Chinese speakers consider appropriate to say in hypothetical scenarios). The participants were 22 native Chinese speakers recruited from a university in China. They completed a 20-item Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT) tapping two contextual variables: power and imposition. The results show that: (1) both power and imposition exerted significant influence on the frequency of producing internal and external modifications, (2) the various internal and external modifiers were differentially associated with the two contextual variables, and (3) the preferred sequential organization of external modifications differed according to context types.
Yinwei ‘because’ is a causal conjunction or preposition indicating a causal relation between two clauses, NPs and other discourse units in Mandarin Chinese. Building on the previous research, this study examines how yinwei is used by conversational participants to organize talk and accomplish interactional tasks in Mandarin conversation. Adopting the methodologies of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study examines 11 hours of everyday Mandarin conversational data, and explores the interactional functions of yinwei-clauses. An examination of the data shows that yinwei-clauses have a variety of interactional functions in everyday Mandarin conversation. Two particular interactional functions of yinwei-clauses are accounts for a speaker’s prior action such as disagreement and strong assertion, and parentheticals providing background information related to the ongoing talk.
The meta-language unit “I say to you” is frequently heard in Mandarin Chinese conversations, and are most commonly expressed as wo gen ni shuo ‘I say to you’, wo gen ni jiang ‘I talk to you’, or wo gaosu ni ‘I tell you’, collectively termed “I-say-to-you” expressions. Quantitative investigations reveal that they are dedicated interactional resources found only in spoken conversation. By using conversation analytic methodology, further examination of their sequential trajectory shows that a core function of “I-say-to-you” expressions is to preface upcoming “delicate” matters, such as dispreferred next action, disagreement or disaffiliative turn, and other actions that may be resistance-implicative for the recipient. As a preface, “I-say-to-you” expressions can be used by the speaker to secure multi-turns space with which to gradually deliver the “delicate” matter and achieve other interactional goals.
This study reexamines Mandarin Chinese near-synonyms jian (建), zao (造), gai (蓋) ‘to build’ and their shared patterns in written and spoken genres. Three independent variables – including word length of the object NP, preverbal locative phrase, and building purpose – were tested by a logistic regression analysis (Rbrul) to account for the multiple crosscutting and interacting factors that influence language usage. Multivariate analyses show that word length and building purpose can account for the differences among these verbs in both genres. The analyses suggest that the use of jian (建) and zao (造) possess more written properties, while gai (蓋) favors the spoken genre. The current study contributes to a growing number of studies in Chinese near-synonyms by focusing on genre variation.
This paper reports a corpus-based study to examine how Chinese near-synonyms choose their typical collocates. Near-synonyms commonly misused by English-speaking learners of Chinese were selected for analysis. Results obtained from the corpora (the Chinese Internet Corpus by the University of Leeds and the Lancaster corpus of Mandarin Chinese) indicate that the collocational behaviors of the selected synonyms are constrained by their own semantic, grammatical, prosodic, stylistic and pragmatic features and hence are explainable to second/foreign learners. Findings of this study will contribute to the design of collocation/synonym dictionary as well as the instruction of collocations as a second/foreign language.
This study investigates the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the generic/episodic interpretation of Chinese sentences containing a state complement (SC) realized by an adjectival phrase (AP). It argues that the generic interpretation of such sentences is a result of the interaction of the semantics of the verb or verb phrase before 得 de (V/VP-得), the AP complement after 得 de, and pragmatic knowledge. A sentence with an AP state complement will be interpreted as generic when the V/VP-得 in the sentence expresses repeatable or sum events, and when it is determined, given one’s pragmatic knowledge and the semantics of the AP complement, that the property or state expressed by the AP can apply to a relevant event or individual in all events expressed by V/VP-得 in general.
This corpus-driven study focuses on two metaphorically used kinship terms in Modern Chinese, 父 fu ‘father’ and 母 mu ‘mother’. Under investigation are two constructions [A shi B zhi fu] ‘A is the father of B’ and [A shi B zhi mu] ‘A is the mother of B’. It is found that the figurative meanings expressed by mu (mother) are more conventionalized than those expressed by fu. The study shows that mu has higher metaphoricity, and I argue that the degree of metaphoricity of the two kinship terms in Chinese is a function both of the experiential basis of cognition in terms of universal biological phenomenon and of cultural constraints, especially Confucian thoughts, on conceptualization.
Time expressions are one of the fundamental concepts of human cognition and communication and thus have been the major concern in many linguistics, applied and developmental psycholinguistic studies (e.g. Klein & Li 2009; Li & Bowerman 1998; Shirai, Slobin, & Weist 1998). A study of time expressions in Modern Chinese (Mandarin) was conducted to explore the common patterns, system networks and realizations from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. The results indicated that (1) time expressions can be classified as extent or location; definite or indefinite, (2) within extent a distinction can be made between duration and frequency; within location there are subcategories of Absolute and Relative; of Rest and Motion (3) the forms used to realize these time elements of time are nominal groups, adverbs and pre-verbal phrases, though not all subcategories of temporal elements are realized by all these forms.
In light of the growing interest in investigating the ethnic minority Kam people in China, this paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis to explore how Kam people’s identity is represented and negotiated in spoken narratives with outside researchers. Drawing on sociolinguistic approaches to identity analysis (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006; Blommaert 2005) and membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1972a & b, 1992; Baker 2004; Fitzgerald and Housley 2015), this paper explores the relationships between Kam people’s sense of membership in their ethnic community and social practices that define this sense of membership. It focuses on the self-representation of a former Kam village head in a remote village in Southern China, Guizhou Province, and explores his way of conceptualizing being a Kam with a view to examining the relationship between his representation of the ethnic identity and the sociocultural impacts on this identity construction process.
Corpus linguistics is crucial to language education, but many corpora do not pay enough attention to curriculum and pedagogical needs. To address this issue and in view of Singapore’s unique language environment, the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language built two specialised corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore, which comprise a Written Corpus and a Spoken Corpus. The Written Corpus provides information on Chinese characters, vocabulary words and sentence structures used in written materials daily; while the Spoken Corpus provides guidelines for attainable spoken proficiency of primary school students at different academic levels. With these corpora, curriculum developers can design syllabi with greater precision on the language content and address the learning gap for Chinese language proficiency. As for teachers, an online resource platform developed based on the Written Corpus provides them with authentic materials and practical applications (such as the text grading module) as reliable tools and resources for lesson preparation and learning assessment.