VO-OV Mixed Word Order in Mandarin Chinese and Its Effects
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- Keywords: contextual filtering; structural ambiguity; word order typology
- Abstract: This paper revisits the word order type of Mandarin with reference to the fifteen pairs of grammatical elements correlated with VO-OV language types proposed by Dryer (1992a, 2009, 2011) and Haspelmath (2006). The research indicates that among the fifteen pairs, ten pairs exist in Mandarin and the other five are absent. In the relevant ten pairs, Mandarin has four pairs exhibiting both VO and OV word orders, three pairs tend to be in OV order, and the last three tend to be in VO order. Therefore, Mandarin can be seen as a VO-OV mixed order type language. As in the case of the genetic advantages and defects acquired by biological mixed or hybrid species, Mandarin VO-OV mixed order on the one hand brings more available syntactic structures and much expressive convenience, while on the other hand it pays the price of resulting in structural ambiguity. However, the de-contextualized ambiguous structures can be clarified in meaning through contextual filtering in communications, so Mandarin obtains relatively more benefits from VO-OV mixed word order.
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Verb-Object Movement Processing in CSL
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- Keywords: gender difference; processing; V-O movement
- Abstract: The study of gender difference is an important sub-branch of linguistic research, especially for language acquisition, such as vocabulary acquisition, grammar acquisition, and syntactic acquisition. In the teaching of Chinese as a second language, some studies found that students from the Uygur areas had difficulty in learning sentences containing component movement, and gender differences also exist to make this mechanism more intricate. In this paper, we use the self-paced reading experiment to investigate both the ability of Uygur students to process Chinese V-O movement structures and gender differences in real-time processing. We found: Females process “Yijing” V-O movement structure better than males, and while males do better in simple movement sentences, females performed faster in most phases of processing. Interaction effects of gender and movement type, and of sentence type and movement type, as long as main effects of gender, sentence type, and movement type contribute to these differences in accuracy and response time of components in Chinese V-O movement structure. This study will benefit the theoretical study of Chinese V-O movement structure and its acquisition, and the study of acquisition of gender differences by non-native Chinese speakers.
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Compositionality as a Prototypical Category
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- Keywords: Chinese four-character idioms; Cognitive Linguistics; compositionality; idiom classification
- Abstract: This paper proposes a classification of Chinese four-character idioms into prototypical categories of high, medium, and low compositionality on the basis of a cognitive linguistic approach to compositionality. Traditional views of idiomaticity usually regard idioms as “dead” metaphors, ruling out any compositional analysis of their constituent words to derive their idiomatic meanings. However, Cognitive Linguistics takes a contrary view of meanings of constituent parts and meanings of idioms comprised of these parts. It is proposed in this paper that the constituents of some idioms possess identifiable meanings associated with idiomatic meanings and compositionality can be regarded as a feasible criterion for sorting Chinese idioms. In light of the degree of contribution given by individual Chinese characters’ meanings to the stipulated figurative meanings, Chinese idioms can be classified into three types, i.e. as having a high, medium, or low degree of compositionality. The introspection-based classification and a series of rating studies have been justified within the Cognitive Linguistic framework of Idiomatic Activation-Set (Langlotz, 2006).
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