|
Abstracts Section A: Linguistics and Languages (classical and modern)
OVERVIEW
A1: Language History and History of
Languages (Schedule)
Masini, Federico (chair)
Behr, Wolfgang: What's in
a Pre-Qin Name, Again
Klöter, Henning: Missionary Linguistics in the 17th Century: The Case of Southern Min
Di Toro, Anna: An Analysis of the 'Kitajskaja grammatika' by N. Ja. Bičurin (1777-1853)
Romagnoli, Chiara: The Interpretation of Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics" in China after 1985
A2: Historical Syntax and Grammaticalization
(Schedule)
Peyraube, Alain (chair)
Statu, Nicolae Cristian: Parsing Mengzi: An Empirical Study of the Syntax of Classical Chinese
Chao, Fang-yi: The Establishment of the Verbal Classifier System in the Chinese Language
Chen, Yin-ling: On the Grammaticalization of the Mandarin Verb YAO
A3: Mandarin Syntax and Pragmatics
(Schedule)
Klöter, Henning (chair)
Alleton, Viviane: L'expression de la subjectivité en chinois mandarin : le verbe auxiliaire yao
Iljic, Robert: Issues in modality: chinese hui
Hsiung, Hui-ju: Time Is A River: The Conceptual Metaphors Of Time In Mandarin Chinese
Del Gobbo, Francesca: On Chinese Relative Clauses and the Restrictive vs. Descriptive Distinction
Petrovcic, Mateja: The particle de in Chinese noun phrases with several attributive
A4: Language Corpora and their Use
(Schedule)
Alleton, Viviane (chair)
Hu, Xiaoling, Nigel Williamson, Jamie McLaughlin: Chinese Texts in Electronic Form for Linguistic Analysis Project
Jiang, Ping: A Corpus-Based Investigation of 3-tone Systems across Chinese Dialects
Kadar, Zoltan Daniel: The Powerful and the Powerless - A socio-pragmatic analysis of Chinese polite self-denigrating/speech-partner-elevating addressing
ABSTRACTS
A1: Language History and History of Languages
Masini, Federico (chair)
Behr, Wolfgang: What's in a pre-Qin name, again
Late Imperial and modern studies of pre-Qin Chinese clan,
family, and personal names have centered on historical, anthropological,
sociological and philosophical issues, revolving around familiar naming
practices, lineage construction, seniority hierarchies and clan
interrelationships, social or ethnic alterity discourses, and, of course,
naming taboos (for overviews see Zhou Fagao 1958, Bauer 1959, Goldin 2000).
Linguistic approaches to the topic have so far mainly catered to
sociolinguistic interests (Zhu & Millward 1980, Sung 1981), including
gender studies, or tapped personal name distributions as an independent
anthropogeographical body of data to be matched against results obtained by
molecular population genetics and historical linguistics (Du Ruofu 1990, 1992;
Feng Shi 1997). Apart from its employment as an assessment tool for
phonetically based naming taboos, phonological properties of personal names
have by and large been neglected, althoug they offer a wealth of insights into
pre-Qin history, society and thought.
Proceeding from observations in a recent article by Fu Dingmiao ("Shanggu
renming de yiyun guanxi", Qiannan Minzu Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao 2.2002, pp.
8-13) I will show on the basis of data culled from pre-Qin eidted sources (cf.
Zhou Fagao 1958, Pan Ying 1993), and from Zhou bronze inscriptions (Wu Zhenfeng
1987), that a wide range of phonological correlation types (by rhyme,
alliteration, assonance, consonance, syllable type harmony of differenet
subtypes) occurs. These correlation techniques functionally target
(a) personal name constituents
(b) family/clan name -- personal name relationships
(c) relative names, especially sibling association
(d) taboo practices.
A very important phenomenon encountered in all these four categories is
correspondance of (disyllabic) allegro and (mono- or sesquisyllabic) lento
forms obtaining between the name elements to be associated.
After discussion of illustrative examples for all types and a preliminary
stastistical overview of the data, I will comment on clues encoded by such
practices for the (re)reading of Early Chinese edited texts. If time permits, I
will finally show how these phenomena might be integrated as test evidence for
several moot questions in Old Chinese phonology (such as A/B syllalble type
prosodies, initial consonant clusters, detection of loanwords etc.).
Klöter, Henning: Missionary Linguistics in the 17th century: The Case of Southern Min
In the late 16th century, Spanish Dominicans started
missionary work among Chinese immigrants in the Philippines, most of whom spoke
a Zhangzhou variety of the Southern Min group of dialects. The missionaries’
philological activities were not only restricted to the translation of the
Christian doctrine into the native tongue of the immigrants, but also included
the compilation of manuscript dictionaries and grammars. Predating the first
Chinese accounts by 200 years, these manuscripts are by far the earliest extant
descriptions of early Southern Min pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax. They
also provide invaluable information about early popular conventions of writing
the Southern Min vernacular with Chinese characters.
The paper will first provide a brief inventory of extant manuscripts, including
information about their present locations. On the basis of selected examples,
it will then demonstrate the significance of these manuscripts for diachronic
research on Southern Min dialects. Lastly, by placing the findings into the
context of recent studies on the history of missionary linguistics inside and
outside China, it will be shown that missionary dialect descriptions started
roughly at the same time as philological investigations of the court language
and the Classical language. The historical contextualization thus contradicts
the commonly held view that missionary dialect description was a Protestant
innovation of the 19th century.
Di Toro, Anna: An Analysis of the 'Kitajskaja grammatika' by N. Ja. Bičurin (1777-1853)
Nikita Jakovlevič Bičurin (Father Iakinf), one of
the founders of Russian sinology, boasts a very rich and diversified
production: translations of Chinese Classics and texts on history and
geography, many works on Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan history and the
compilation of a Chinese-Russian dictionary. But, apart from being an
outstanding scholar, Bičurin was also an experienced teacher of Chinese
language: he taught the students of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Beijing
from 1808 to 1821 and later, from 1830 to 1838, was appointed teacher in the
school of Chinese of Kjachta.
The Chinese language school of Kjachta, officially founded in 1831 to fulfil
the demand of translators in the border town, one of the main trading centres
between Russia and China, had a life of more than 30 years. It was the first
Russian school of Chinese to follow a precise pedagogical programme, fixed by
Bičurin himself. A fundamental role in the frame of this programme was
played by Bičurin's Kitajskaja grammatika, published in Saint Petersburg
in 1835 and later, in a new enlarged edition, in 1838.
In my paper I will first analyse the structure of the grammar, consisting of a
preface, two parts and some tables and appendixes. The preface contains a
general introduction to the Chinese language and some remarks on the grammars
of the Chinese language written before by other European scholars. The first
part of the book analyses the peculiarities of the Chinese language, such as
tones, the frequency of polysemy and the form of writing, while in the second
part the author describes the main grammatical and syntactical features. The
appendixes and tables that conclude the book comprise some comparative tables
of the various graphical forms of several characters, the table of the 214
radicals, a table listing and explaining the use of 43 classifiers, and other
appendixes representing a practical support for the students of Chinese.
I will also compare Bičurin's work with some of the European grammars he
quotes in the introduction to the Kitajskaja grammatika, such as the texts
compiled by Fransisco Varo, Stephen Fourmont, Abel-Rémusat and Robert Morrison.
Romagnoli, Chiara: The interpretation of Saussure's "Course in general linguistics" in China after 1985
First known by the Japanese version, later translated into
Chinese by Gao Mingkai, the Course in general linguistics was pubblished in
China only in 1980. This is probably one of the reasons why the discussion
about saussurean linguistics in China is still so lively and open. In this
paper I’ll try to present the most interesting analysis given by Chinese
linguists after 1985 about particular issues. While in the first period of
saussurean studies the most discussed theme was the necessity to divide or not
to divide langue (language) and parole (speech), recently thanks to a deeper
reading of the Course and the translations of De Mauro’s critical work, Chinese
linguists are thinking over different questions, such as the arbitrariness of
linguistic sign, the importance of saussurean theory in the field of semiotics
and the influence of saussurean linguistics on the development of such fields
as sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and pragmatics. It’s very interesting
to notice that while some Chinese linguists think that the arbitrariness of
linguistic sign is the most important principle in the semiotic theory (Suo
Zhenyu, Zhang Nini, Lu Deping), a big number of them try to prove that the
iconicity rules the relationship between the form of linguistic sign and its
meaning., between signifier and signified (Chen Jiaxuan, Wang Yin,Qin Hongwu).
A2: Historical Syntax and Grammaticalization
Peyraube, Alain (chair)
Statu, Nicolae Cristian: Parsing Mengzi: An Empirical Study of the Syntax of Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese is characterized by several grammatical
phenomena that are notoriously difficult to parse, such as ellipsis,
topicalization, dynamic shifts of grammatical category, etc. Although all of
these are common to most languages, in the case of classical Chinese their
conjunction and frequency turn them into central issues. Moreover, for not
punctuated text the situation is further complicated by the absence of vital
segmentation information. Since ambiguity is an inherent quality of natural
language, parsers unavoidably generate alternative structures. However in the
case of classical Chinese excluding meaningless readings in order to avoid
blind overgeneration is a crucial issue and requires a systematic approach.
This paper attempts to tackle the problems of parsing classical Chinese by
means of an experiment: several different formal descriptions of the grammar of
selected fragments from the Mengzi are drawn up and then, based on these,
different algorithms are developed and implemented in order to parse fragments
of the text. Based on experimental results I discuss the adequacy of various
grammar formalisms (e.g. lexicalized grammars and rule-based grammars) and
parsing techniques (e.g. well-formed substring tables or slot-filling
algorithms) for processing classical Chinese texts and the ways in which they
can be adapted and/or combined for optimal results. I then discuss the
possibility of enhancing the algorithms so as to accept unpunctuated text.
Finally, I try to assess the usefulness of this approach to furthering our
understanding of classical Chinese, as well as the possible applications of
parsers to the analysis of texts in classical Chinese.
Chao, Fang-yi: The Establishment of the Verbal Classifier System in the Chinese Language
One of the typological characteristics of modern Chinese
language is the classifier system. Traditionally the classifier system is
divided by Chinese linguists (such as Liu Shiru, 1965) into two categories,
i.e. nominal classifiers and verbal classifiers. Syntactically a nominal
classifier “must occur with a number and/or a demonstrative before a noun” (Li
& Thompson, 1981). While a verbal classifier must occur with a number
and/or a demonstrative after a verb in modern Chinese language. There have been
a lot of attentions on nominal classifiers since the significant role
categorization played in human cognition was pointed out by cognitive linguists
(such as Bolinger 1965 and Lakoff, 1973). However, there has not been as much
effort devoted to the investigation of verbal classifiers in the Chinese
language. The reason for this neglect of verbal classifiers lies in the
superficial similarities between verbal classifiers and nominal classifiers:
they both need to occur with a number or a demonstrative, and they both occur
between the verb and the object of the verb, when an object is present. This
paper argues that verbal classifiers and nominal classifiers categorize two
different lexical classes, represent two different stages of cognitive
evolvement, and function within two different kinds of phrase structures in the
Chinese language. To demonstrate the significance of the verbal classifiers in
forming the conceptual classification structure, this paper attempts to show
the process of the establishment of the verbal classifier system as well as its
effects to the Chinese linguist system.
Chen, Yin-ling: On the Grammaticalization of the Mandarin Verb YAO
This paper aims to thoroughly investigate the syntactic and
semantic properties of the Mandarin verb yao ‘to request/ask for’ and elaborate
the grammaticalization process involved. Grammaticalization of yao from a
volitional verb to a conjunction not only language- internally results in
polysemy in Mandarin but also language- externally brings about phonetical
analogy to its neighboring dialect, Taiwanese.
Semantically, yao can diversely express ‘request’, or ‘desire’ as syntactically
a volitional verb, ‘obligation’, as a deontic modal, ‘necessity’ or
‘possibility’ as an epistemic modal, ‘future’, and ‘immediate future’ as a
aspectual marker, ‘conditional’ as a conjunction and ‘alternative’ as a
preposition. Compelling to the cross-linguistic tendency that volitional verbs
evolve future tenses (Ultan 1978, Bybee and Pagliuca 1985, Bybee et al. 1991),
the polysemy of yao is not a chance artifact (Aijmer 1985, Anderson 1986, Bybee
and Pagliuca 1985) but a consequence of grammaticalization. (Hopper 1991).
Parallel to the diachronic change of the modal verb beh ‘want’ in Taiwanese,
(Chang 1991), the grammaticalization of yao might start from a volitional verb,
to a modal auxiliary, to a future aspectual marker, and to a conditional
preposition. (Bybee et al. 1991).
The disambiguation of yao highly relies on its syntactic distributions. A bare
yao that only takes a concrete NP as its compliment is a volitional verb that
expresses request while yao following an optional xian ‘think’ that takes a
abstract VP as a compliment is a volitional verb that expresses desire. When
co-occurring with a sentential particle le ‘have done’, yao is an aspectual
marker that expresses immediate future. While a bare yao that takes a VP might
be a deontic modal, an epistemic modal and a future marker, adverbs such as
yi-ding ‘definitely’ or ying-gai ‘supposedly’ may optionally precede yao,
expressing obligation or possibility, which leaves future marker reading the
default interpretation for a bare yao. Biclausally, paired yao expresses
alternative as a preposition, while a single yao expresses conditional as a
conjunction.
Despite the grammaticalization of yao that results in polysemy in Mandarin, its
counterpart is intact in Taiwanese. Volitional yao that expresses request in
Taiwanese is tho; the one that expresses desires is si)u)-beh. The modal that
expresses obligation is ai or su-yao, while the aspectual markers are beh and
beh…a, expressing future and immediate future. Na-si and the paired syllabic m
express conditional and alternative, respectively. Although yao in Mandarin and
beh in Taiwanese are not phonetically related, beh tends to be used in
situations where other lexical items are used (Chang 1991), which may be an
analogy to the Mandarin yao. This is evidence that, due to close interaction,
grammaticalization of beh is undergoing lexical diffusion (Wang 1969) in
Taiwanese.
A3: Mandarin Syntax and Pragmatics
Klöter, Henning (chair)
Alleton, Viviane: L'expression de la subjectivité en chinois mandarin : le verbe auxiliaire yao
En mandarin contemporain, le lexème yao peut remplir
plusieurs fonctions grammaticales, associées à des valeurs sémantiques
distinctes : préposition, verbe d’action (« vouloir/ vouloir que »), verbe
auxiliaire (« vouloir » / «devoir » / évaluation d’une imminence ou d’une
qualité).
Le sens de base de yao est « vouloir ». Dans cette acception, il peut gouverner
un nom, une proposition ou un autre verbe (Vx-V2). Il n’est modal que dans ce
dernier cas, ce ne contredit pas l’hypothèse de E. Benveniste selon laquelle
les volitifs sont « modalisants par occasion ». Par contraste, la valeur
déontique « devoir », comme les acceptions épistémiques se rencontrent exclusivement
en construction de verbe auxiliaire.
Le caractère subjectif du volitif est évident. Pour les autres valeurs modales
de yao, on peut montrer, en l’opposant aux autres verbes déontiques et
épistémiques du mandarin contemporain, que la composante « subjectivité » est
bien ce qui le caractérise. Nous tenons compte de la relation entre énonciateur
et sujet, des indications sur la personne, des types de verbes auxiliés (V2),
de leur caractère volontaire ou non, des marques d’aspect et de temps, du mode
de l’énoncé .
Nous opposons yao à d’autres auxiliaires modaux déontiques et épistémiques,
dans des contextes identiques ou en modifiant les conditions d’interaction.
Dans un domaine comme celui des modaux, ouvert à toutes les extrapolations, il
importe de ne pas se contenter de l’étude des valeurs sémantiques et
pragmatiques des formes étudiées : une analyse syntaxique soigneuse est un
préalable trop souvent négligé.
Iljic, Robert: Issues in modality: chinese hui
The modal verb hui in Chinese has two apparently unrelated
values : capacity and probability.
(1)Ta hui youyong.
<s/he-HUI-swim>
‘S/he can swim.’
(2 Kan yangzi hui xia yu.
<look-appearance-HUI-fall-rain>
‘It looks like rain.’
This dichotomy rests upon a narrow range of examples (know-how, weather
forecast) and does not allow one to see that they are related.
By means of examples such as :
(3) Tie hui shengxiu.
<iron-HUI-get rusty>
‘Iron rusts.’
(4) Zhuzi hui kaihua.
<bamboo-HUI-blossom>
a) ‘Bamboo blossoms.’ [generic property] ; b) ‘This bamboo will blossom.’
[prediction]
we show that the first value is actually a latent property (p), acquired or
inborn, applicable to both the animate and inanimate, which reveals itself only
under appropriate conditions, and the second one an inference the speaker makes
about one particular event, based on what he knows (what conditions activate
p), and identifying such conditions within one particular situation.
The utterance containing the epistemic hui is a conclusion reached through a
deductive reasoning, not a simple opinion. There is an underlying notion of
necessity in the latent property. The transition from latent property to
epistemic necessity, which implies a difference in contextual determination, is
founded upon classic syllogistic reasoning : general law applying to a class of
situations - recognition of an entity as an instance of the class - application
of the law to the particular case .
(5)Ren dou you yi si.
<man-all-have-one-die>
‘Men are mortal.'
Sugeladi shi ren.
<Socrates-is-man>
‘Socrates is a man.'
Sugeladi hui si.
<Socrates-HUI-die>
‘Socrates will die.’
It is a matter of internal necessity, stemming from the intrinsic nature or
essence of things, not possibility.
Hsiung, Hui-ju: Time Is A River: The Conceptual Metaphors Of Time In Mandarin Chinese
The goal of this paper is to present the conceptual metaphor
TIME IS A RIVER as a primary metaphor for the spatialization of time in
mandarin Chinese. In particular, this paper, based on this conceptual metaphor,
provides an account for the orientation of time in both the horizontal axis and
vertical axis of movement.
The decisive claim in the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980) refers to “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system”. For
Chinese people, the time metaphors invoked by the spatial concepts are based
even more on the conceptual domain of river that is directly related to our
world experiences.
The metaphorical mappings between the domain of time and river can be attested
by some common lexical items, such as liu ‘stream’ or ‘to flow’, su ‘to go
upstream’, zhi ‘stagnant’, du ‘cross’, liu-nian ‘the fleeting time’, liu-guang
‘time’, shi-shui ‘time’…etc. Furthermore, they can also be proved by a great
number of metaphorical expressions which not only exist in the daily language
but also in the ancient literatures for representing the concepts of time. This
gives evidence to the fact that the metaphorical projections from the domain of
river to the domain of time are deep-rooted in the Chinese culture.
The previous studies on the orientation of time were very divergent. On the basis
of TIME IS A RIVER metaphor, I differentiate between the temporal stream and
temporal coordinates according to the relative motion. I suggest that 1) the
temporal stream and ego are always dynamic, 2) both the temporal stream and ego
move forward from the past to the future, while the temporal coordinates move
from the future to the past, and 3) in the vertical axis, an earlier time is
higher than a later time at the temporal coordinates. Similarly, in the
horizontal axis, an earlier time is anterior to a later time at the temporal
coordinates.
Del Gobbo, Francesca: On Chinese Relative Clauses and the Restrictive vs. Descriptive Distinction
According to Chao (1968) and Hashimoto (1971) a relative
clause (RC) in Chinese is descriptive if it follows a demonstrative, but
restrictive if it precedes it:
(1) na ge [dai yanjing de]nanhai
that CL wear glasses DE boy
‘that boy, who wears glasses’
(2) [dai yanjiing de]na ge nanhai
wear glasses DE that CL boy
‘the boy who wears glasses’
I show that the RC in (1) is a restrictive RC. The semantic difference between
(1) and (2) is due to the presence of a generic quantifier within NP (Larson
and Takahashi 2002). In support of this hypothesis, I show that Chinese
prenominal RCs have the same ordering preferences noted by Larson and Takahashi
(2002) for Japanese and Korean RCs and English prenominal modifiers. I conclude
that a treatment of Chinese prenominal RCs as adjectival modifiers can explain
their ability to modify proper names.
In summary, Chinese RCs modifying proper names are not appositive RCs
(propositions), but appositive adjectival RCs (predicates). A new mode of
semantic composition, Appositive Modification, allows Chinese RCs to combine
with proper names without preventing the latter to further saturate.
Petrovcic, Mateja: The particle de in Chinese noun phrases with several attributive
There are over sixty rules explaining how to use the
particle de in Chinese noun phrases and what is the order among the
attributives before the head noun. However, most of the existing rules are
dealing with the noun phrases with only one attributive present, that means
with the situations where no or just one particle de is to be used.
This paper focuses on larger noun phrases with more than one attributive,
whereby is trying to highlight the usage of the particle de from the
syntactical point of view. One aim is to find out how many particles de are to
be expected and on which position in the noun phrase they would occur.
If there is more than one attributive, some rules are not appropriate any more,
although they work perfectly well in the cases with a single attributive. There
are situations which would require more than one de to keep the noun phrase
acceptable, but nevertheless, the same information can be expressed in other
way to avoid the conflict among different rules. No matter, how long the noun
phrases are and how many attributives there are in a noun phrase, just one
particle de is usually found in the whole noun phrase. The paper is further
dealing with the question, which of the potential de's will stay and which will
be omitted.
A4: Language Corpora and their Use
Alleton, Viviane (chair)
Hu, Xiaoling, Nigel Williamson, Jamie McLaughlin: Chinese Texts in Electronic Form for Linguistic Analysis Project
(Funded by the British Academy)
University of Sheffield, UK
Studies on historical Chinese syntax often omit a thorough diachronic
investigation across sections of data from different periods of Chinese history
that would enable a better understanding of grammaticalization process. This is
partially due to the absence of readily available a corpus of fully marked up
Chinese texts. As a simple illustrative example, one of the texts we propose to
use in this initial pilot project, ‘Zhuzi Yulei’ (Classified Conversations of
Master Zhu by Zhuxi (thirteenth century), is available in an on-line database
(http://libnt.npm.gov.tw/s25/) in Taiwan but there is no generalised full text
search: the performable operations are limited to only three simple searches of
a single word, of two words and of either of two words, and only to single
chapters. Our project is intended to ameliorate this situation by creating a
corpus of Chinese texts that are marked up in such a way to permit linguistic
analysis to be carried out. In this pilot project the grammaticalization of the
object marker ba and the passive marker bei is re-examined from a diachronic
perspective.
The project is currently in a pilot phase and will be creating a limited corpus
of texts using electronic material where possible. The texts will be marked up
using XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML and SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language) have been used to mark up texts in Indo-European languages
like English. But their application to Chinese is still at an early stage. The
XML research group in Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, has just completed a
project on converting Chinese dictionaries into XML format for automatic
extraction of some elements such as synonyms but their project is in the
context of Chinese Windows. Our project will not be in the Chinese Windows
context. It is therefore the first attempt in Britain to apply the new
technology to Chinese texts and make it available on the Web which will be a
significant contribution to the application of XML/SGML to Chinese. In
addition, parallel English translations are added to broaden the accessibility
of the fully-marked up Chinese texts. This paper will present the initial
findings of the pilot project and demonstrate the possibilities of the
technology.
Jiang, Ping: A Corpus-Based Investigation of 3-tone Systems across Chinese Dialects
This paper investigates three-tone systems across Chinese
dialects, focusing on tonal inventories in terms of cross-linguistic
distributions. Our investigation is conducted through “An Online Bilingual Database
of Chinese Dialects” which contains all data extracted from 41 dialectal
dictionaries and two major linguistic journals (i.e. Zhongguo Yuwen and
Fangyan) published in Mainland China during 1979 to 2002 (Jiang 2001, 2002).
There are 75 three-tone dialects in this database. In general, the number of
contour tones outranks that of level tones, and the number of falling contours
is slightly higher than that of rising contours. In particular, a dialect may
have contour tones, but no level tones. In the 75 dialects surveyed, there are
10 dialects containing no level tones (i.e., 6 out of 10 have two falling tones
and 4 out of 10 have two rising tones), but no dialect is found having no
contour tones. Our findings also show that four types of distributional
properties exist in terms of cross-linguistic frequency.
The first type is symmetrical distribution of tonal patterns. The majority of
three-tone systems maximally contrast tonal patterns in that the three tones
are distributed equally in level, falling and rising patterns. This is parallel
to the symmetrical distribution of vowel systems reported by Greenberg (1976),
and can be explained by the Principle of Maximal Perception.
The second type of distributional property is asymmetric distribution of level
tones. Among the 75 three-tone systems, 65 have level tones (61 of them have
one level tone, and 4 of them have two level tones). Of the 65 dialects
containing level tones, 51 of them have high tone and 10 of them have mid tone.
No dialect has only low tone. Within the 4 dialects that have two level tones,
3 of them have both high and mid levels, and 1 has high and low levels. No
dialect has a combination of mid and low levels. This type of asymmetry can be
attributed to the effect of Tonal Sonority Hierarchy proposed by Jiang-King
(1996, 1998, 1999).
The third type of distributional property is register asymmetry among contour
tones. Falling contours have the tendency to fall from high to mid or from high
to low rather than from mid to low. On the other hand, rising contours have the
tendency to rise from low to mid or from mid to high rather than from low to
high. This is due to the ease of articulation: falling from high to mid or from
high to low takes less effort. The same is true for rising from low to mid or
from mid to high.
The fourth type distributional property is complementary distribution between
simple rising contour and complex contour. That is, if a dialect has a simple
rising tone, it does not have a complex contour tone, and vise versa. This
supports the phonetic observation that all tones have a slightly falling onset
on the spectrogram.
Kadar, Zoltan Daniel: The Powerful and the Powerless - A socio-pragmatic analysis of Chinese polite self-denigrating/speech-partner-elevating addressing
The aim of this presentation is to discuss a
socio-pragmatically relevant and unstudied property of the Chinese polite
self-denigration and speech-partner-elevation system, that how the whole
vocabulary of denigrating/elevating address terms can be categorized. The
question is, how many significant social groups existed in the pre-modern China
which had their own self-denigrating terminology as speakers, and
other-elevating-terminology as hearers.
It is known in general that some of the social groups used to have an
independent vocabulary of denigrating/elevating terms. It is clear that some of
the major groups, like the officials, possessed an independent
denigrating/elevating terminology, but it is a problem that not only the minor
but also even some of the major social groups, such as the peasants or the
merchants, did not have any kind of specific terminology, i.e. the social
distribution of Chinese polite elevating/denigrating terms seems to be
unsystematic.
The analysis will show that it is the so-called 'power' semantic – the
linguistic manifestation of social power – what formed the socio-pragmatic
system of polite denigrating/elevating addressing. It will be discussed that -
according to their elevation/denigration use - every Chinese social group can
be categorised into one of three major groups, so a concrete socio-pragmatic
system of polite elevation/denigration exists. The speech-partner-elevation and
self-denigration implicated within and without these groups is controlled by
the 'power' semantic. And the whole denigration/elevation terminology can be
ranged into these three groups.
As a conclusion, a model of the socio-pragmatic system of polite
elevation/denigration will be created.
Last update: Jul 21, 2004 (AJ)
|
