Journal of Chinese Linguistics最新文献

The word mulaolao (木佬佬) in Wu Chinese first appeared in written documents published during the period of the former Republic of China. It originated in Hangzhou dialect and spread to other regions such as Ningbo Taizhou, Jinhua, and Shanghai. In Hangzhou dialect, mulaolao serves both adjectival and adverbial purposes, and it is believed to have derived from the expressive adjective manlaolao (蛮老老). In manlaolao, the suffix - laolao (老老) intensifies the degree of a state or property and is written as “佬佬” due to its uncertain etymology. The man (蛮) part originally meant “rude and unreasonable” or “doughty” but has evolved to also mean “many”. In its weakened form, it underwent a checkedization1 process and was consequently pronounced as mu and written with a homophonous character “木”. The adjectival form of mulaolao is widely used, but in adverbial positions, it underwent semantic bleaching to become an adverb and fused into mao (冒). The adverbial usage of mulaolao is less prevalent among younger speakers.

The “Ruguo(如果)” sentence refers to a conditional complex sentence connected by the hypothetical association word “Ruguo( 如果)”. The counterfactual “Ruguo(如果)” sentence includes subjective and objective counterfactual sentence. The judgment of subjective counterfactuality depends on semantic recognition and logical derivation. According to the objective truth and falsehood of the previous and last clause, we can divide the subjective counterfactual “Ruguo( 如 果 )” sentence into 4 categories: A true B false, A true B true or false, A true or false B true, A true or false B false. The pragmatic deriving mode can be summarized as containing both derivation and implicit derivation. The subjective counterfactual “Ruguo(如果)” sentence has the function of expressing stance, including explicit analogies and implicit negation.

Most second language (L2) learners comprehend words more difficult in its spoken form than the written form (Bekleyen 2009). Based on the findings of previous studies, we assumed that word frequency and language proficiency may be two critical factors in spoken word identification. To investigate how these two factors modulate L2 spoken word identification, we recruited Chinese-English bilinguals with different English proficiency levels, and manipulated words’ orthographic consistency, and word frequency. Our results supported the phonological restructuring account, it suggested that only high frequency L2 spoken words can achieve phonological restructuring and rely on orthographic information to access meaning. The less frequently used word has a weak spelling-sound connection, leaving the primitive sound-meaning route the only choice. This effect may be unrelated to language proficiency, the order that orthographic and phonological information is acquired, or the language system. Altogether, these results revealed that Chinese-English bilinguals rely on both the direct route and the orthography-mediation route to process L2 spoken words. The choice of which route is modulated by word frequency.

This article compares the resumptive and expletive views on an understudied use of the Cantonese pronoun keoi5. We demonstrate that the resumptive view as recently proposed in Yip and Ahenkorah (2022) raises a number of complications, and the so-called dummy keoi5 is better analyzed as a non-subject expletive, in line with traditional descriptions in Matthews and Yip (1994/2011).

This paper provides a systematic account of tonogenesis. The emergence of tone is a process of pitch upgrading from an accompanying feature of phonation types to a distinctive feature. It involves three linguistic processes: various phonation types, clear, breathy, falsetto, etc., which intrinsically induce pitch differences; sonorous monosyllabic morpheme structure that enhances the pitch differences; and phonologization, which conceptualizes the enhanced pitch differences to a phonological category, tone. A flowchart is designed to show how the preconditions lead to different phono morphological types of the world’s languages and finally output tone and its later development Furthermore, the geographic distributions and ecological constraints of non-modal voices and tone are explored

The universality and specificity of cross-linguistic reading have always been a topic of interest to researchers. The earliest controversies started with the issue of whether speech recoding is required for reading non-alphabetic scripts, for example, Chinese and Kanji, whether it is possible to directly access the semantic meaning of a word from orthography without speech recoding, and whether reading non-alphabetic scripts relies on the right rather than the left brain. The abatement of these controversies began with a series of experiments by Ovid Tzeng and William Wang which raised the possibility of universality across different languages. To study how humans read, two kinds of operation must be considered: the human cognitive system and the structure of language. In this paper, we will take the original controversy of non-alphabetic scripts being different from alphabetic scripts in the 1970s as the starting point, and use the current research results of cognitive neuroscience to explain what kind of consensus has been reached right now. In addition, we will use tone as an important feature in the study of Chinese reading, and describe the current research results on tone to highlight the special characteristics of Chinese. Finally, we will propose future research directions.

Taking into account data hitherto neglected, this article examines the progressive aspect zài 在 in Mandarin Chinese and related issues. We argue in favour of the constituency [ AspP zài 在 [V-zhe 着]] and demonstrate important syntactic and semantic differences between the progressive aspect zài 在 and the durative aspect -zhe 着 . Importantly, unlike ‘zài 在 V’, ‘V-zhe 着’ is only acceptable as the sole predicate in a root sentence when interpretable as a (derived) state. Otherwise, the presence of the progressive aspect zài 在 is required: ‘zài 在 V-zhe 着’. This crucial role of zài 在 is often obscured by its phonological fusion (haplology) with the preposition zài 在 ‘at’ heading an immediately following prepositional phrase: NP [ AspP zài 在 [ VP [ PP zài 在 NP] [V-zhe 着 NP]]] => NP ZÀI 在 NP V-zhe 着 NP. The presence/absence of an underlying progressive aspect zài 在 (having fused with the preposition zài 在) is reflected in the choice of negation. Since the progressive aspect zài 在 must be negated by méi 没, not bù 不, it follows that no underlying aspectual zài 在 is present when it is bù 不 that negates a VP with a zài 在 PP adjunct NP bù 不 [ VP [ PP zài 在 NP] VP]. By contrast, when there is an underlying aspectual zài 在, the negation méi 没 is required, resulting in the surface sequence ‘NP méi 没 ZÀI 在 NP VP’. Finally, given that a subset of auxiliaries, some stative verbs as well as state-denoting ‘V-zhe 着’ are negated by méi 没, negation of ‘zài 在 VP’ by méi 没 is compatible with the status of ‘zài 在 VP’ as a state, hence able to be true at a moment.

作为吴语西部地区的分支方言，江西上饶广丰话在表达无定语法意 义时与其他方言有很大不同：除了常见的“一量名”短语和省略数 词“一 形成的“量名”短语外，广丰话还可使用“个量名”短语。 从音系、句法和语义三个角度对“一量名”和“个量名”短语的观 察发现，虽然广丰话中的“一”和“个”还保留了数词“一”的解 读 但就语法性质而言 ，它们都基本上演化为 了不定冠词。从“个 量 名”的句法表现 可以推测，“个”的不定冠词用法是通用量词语 法化的结果，这与之前发现的“量名”短语在许多方言中表有定意 义、量词正逐渐演化为准定冠词的情况完全不同，可看作是对汉语 方言指称系统和量词语法研究的重要补充。“一量名”和“个量名” 短语目前在广丰话中处于两者共存，相互竞争的局面，这一情况应 该是广丰话同时受到上饶话和闽北、闽中地区方言影响的结果 。