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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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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A Psycholinguistic Account of L1 Lexical Transfer in L2 Production
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- Keywords: bilingualism; executive control; L2 production; lexical transfer
- Abstract: In its development for more than five decades, numerous empirical language transfer studies have obtained many solid findings in L2 production; however, these findings often concern linguistic expressions but lack deep psycholinguistic explorations. Focusing on lexical transfer, this paper intends to provide a psycholinguistic explanation for the accumulated findings about L1 lexical transfer including conceptual, lemma and lexeme levels. This is achieved through a postulation of a psycholinguistic model of L2 production based on previous studies of bilingual representation, activation and production. Applying this model, it is suggested that the occurrence of many types of lexical transfer can be accounted for by the interaction between bilingual representation and executive control.
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The (Non)-linguistic Effects of Motion Event Typology
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- Keywords: L2 acquisition of caused motion expressions; linguistic relativity; motion event typology; similarity judgment task
- Abstract: This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of Chinese and English judge the similarity between caused motion scenes while viewing them. Our results regarding a) show that Chinese learners of English acclimate to the target pattern of organizing particularly dense caused motion information very rapidly, and English learners of Chinese also arrived at an inter–language showing considerable resemblance to the target system rather than traces of the L1 influence. Our findings regarding b) reveal that despite striking differences between Chinese and English in L1 motion descriptions, native speakers show an identical tendency to prefer the path–match alternate over the manner– match alternate. Overall, these observations suggest that language–specific constraints can be largely shaken off when encoding caused motion in a non– native language, and linguistic and non-linguistic representations of caused motion may be dissociable from each other.
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