Lingua最新文献

This study examines the effectiveness of visual displays in improving the mastery of the forms and functions of English intonation among Chinese L2 students. Over a four-week period, two groups of learners (visual-training and auditory-training) took part in five sessions of intonation training, while a control group received no training. Each session began with a 25-minute lesson on the forms and functions of intonation, followed by a 40-minute practice session. All sentences were presented in communicative contexts. With the aid of speech visualization technology, the visual-training group was taught linguistic categories and English intonation structures, and was encouraged to imitate and practice intonation patterns using visual displays of the intonation of each sentence. The auditory-training group learned and practiced intonation by carefully listening to audio clips of each sentence. Intonation production was assessed using speech data from pre- and post-tests. Results showed that the visual-training group outperformed the other two groups, making the greatest progress in mastering the forms of English intonation (pitch accents and boundary tones) and its functions (expressing prominence and marking modality).

The mass–count distinction in Mandarin Chinese has been heatedly debated in linguistics. Previous research investigated the mass–count distinction primarily through qualitative methods. Our study applied mutual information and created three variation conditions to explore the relationship between Chinese nouns and the individuation function of classifiers. Furthermore, we examined the mass–count distinction by quantitatively analyzing 1,000 instances of Num–CL–N (numeral–classifier–noun) structures. The computational results indicate that the individuation function of classifiers is influenced by noun homogeneity. Moreover, we argue that Chinese nouns exhibit an inclination for homogeneity and the deep semantic processing of nouns is similar to classes or sets, providing evidence for the broad mass noun hypothesis and the collective-name hypothesis in the philosophy of language.

This study proposes a new approach to the transitivity variation of the Mandarin Verb-Object (VO) compound by focusing on the role of the potential objects instead of the incorporated object. This new approach highlights the interactions between language change and variation. Previous approaches to the transitivity variation of VO compounds, especially Mandarin Chinese VO compounds, have typically focused on the purported blocking effect of the incorporated object (O). Recent corpus-driven studies, however, have attested that Mandarin VO compounds can take objects. This study compared clausal contexts in two Chinese varieties when VO compounds take direct objects and showed that the same noun phrase tends to require a context of higher transitivity to function as a direct object in the Mainland variety, complementing the previously established tendencies that Taiwan Verb-Object compounds have higher object-taking abilities. Both changes and variations can be interpreted as lexical constructionalization, supplemented with insights from noun incorporation and lexical diffusion. Argument advancement after compound formation represents lexical constructionalization, motivated by a tendency to encode transitivity with less compositionality. The contrasting contextual and lexical transitivity trends in the two varieties support the shifting encoding of transitivity generalization, illustrating different stages of lexical constructionalization.

It has been regularly maintained that, while widespread in satellite-framed languages, constructions that associate an atelic verb of manner of motion with a spatial prepositional phrase (PP) to denote a telic motion are very rare in verb-framed languages. Yet, in French, these constructions are not as marginal as usually claimed especially as they involve an atelic vs. telic contrast, beyond the mere manner vs. path opposition. After a preliminary delimitation of the constructions studied and a brief presentation of the theoretical framework, this contribution checks the specific meaning properties of French atelic motion verbs that appear in telic motion constructions, using attested data. Cotextual, contextual and pragmatic parameters of the constructions are similarly highlighted by the qualitative analysis carried out. The paper also examines how the telic interpretation arises from the interplay of “tendential” verbs and spatial prepositions/PPs. This study completes a previous analysis by the author on various points, providing an in-depth delineation of the phenomenon at stake and its underpinnings, and focusing on several verbs and verbal locutions that, for different reasons, depart from the criteria identified (e.g., aller ‘to go’, se déplacer ‘to move (around)’, glisser sur ‘to slide on’, grimper à ‘to climb (up)’, tomber ‘to fall’).