Studies of Chinese Linguistics
Functional Approaches
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: Hong Kong University Press, HKU
Contents
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pp. v-vi
Preface
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pp. vii-
A majority of the articles in this book were selected from presentations at the 18th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics held at Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, in June 2006. Since the theme of this volume is on Chinese functional linguistics, many excellent papers on formal syntax and phonology presented at the conference could not be included ...
List of Contributors
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pp. ix-x
Introduction
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pp. 1-6
The aim of this book is to gather the most recent studies of Chinese linguistics within the framework of functionalism. Although the term “functionalism” can apply to a wider range of studies, the current volume limits its scope to Chinese typology, morphology, semantics, syntax, and discourse. Two central questions are repeatedly raised by the contributors of this book: (1) What function does a ...
Section 1 Typological Studies
1 Chinese as a topic-comment (not topic-prominentand not SVO) language
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pp. 9-22
Many linguists in China and the West have talked about Chinese as a topic-comment language, that is, a language in which the structure of the clause takes the form of a topic, about which something is to be said, and a comment, which is what is said about the topic, rather than being a language with a subject-predicate structure like that of English. Y. R. Chao (1968), for example, said that all Chinese clauses have ...
2 The placement of Chinese adverbials revisited: What differentiates Chinese word order from other SVO languages
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pp. 23-44
Among the world’s 449 languages surveyed by Dryer and Gensle (Dryer and Gensle 2005: 342–344), only three VO languages normally put all obliques before the verb, as shown in Table 2.1 below. The three VO languages are Mandarin, Hakka and Cantonese, all belonging to Chinese...
Section 2 Word Structures and Cognitive Grammar
3 Minimal word and its function in Mandarin Chinese
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pp. 47-64
The notion of Minimal Word (MinWd) has always been a fundamental concept in the Prosodic-Morphological systems developed since McCarthy and Prince (1990). It is a prosodically circumscribed domain which may be selected as the locus of morphological transformation..
4 Path of motion: Conceptual structure and representation in Chinese
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pp. 65-84
With the understanding that language is an experientially-based product of the human mind as well as a reflection of how speakers of a language structure the perceptions of reality, this chapter presents a characterization of the conceptual structure for Path of motion events and illustrates how the conceptualization of Path of motion is represented in Mandarin Chinese....
Section 3 Semantics, Pragmatics, and Their Interaction
5 Semantics and pragmatics of color terms in Chinese
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pp. 87-102
Two competing accounts have emerged to explain the reason why color terms follow the same evolutionary sequence discovered by Berlin and Kay (1969): one led by Kay and McDaniel (1978: 617) who claim that the semantics of basic color terms in all languages are the results of a common set of neurophysiological processes in which differences in...
6 Aspect and the post-verbal z�i phrase in Mandarin Chinese
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pp. 103-130
The locative phrase in Chinese is headed by the preposition z�i, and it can occur in three positions in a sentence: before the subject, after the subject but before the verb, and after the verb, as illustrated in (1)...
Section 4 Discourse Analysis
7 Locative particles in spoken Taiwan Mandarin
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pp. 133-154
This chapter examines the choice of simple or complex locative particles in Mandarin speech. Except for nouns that are intrinsic place names (e.g., 台灣 táiwān “Taiwan”) or those that have been conventionally taken as place names (e.g., 飛機場 fēijīchăng “airport”)...
8 From volition and enjoyment to habituality: The cases of ài “love to” and xǐhuan “like to”
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pp. 155-184
In Mandarin Chinese there are a cluster of lexical items that express the meanings of volition and enjoyment, i.e., “like to” and “love to.” Some of the commonly seen lexemes include 偏愛 piān’ài “favor, prefer to,” 喜愛 xǐ’ài “like to,” 好 hào “like to,” 愛好 àihào “fond of,” 喜好 xǐhào “like to,” 喜歡 xǐhuan “like to,” and 愛 ài “love to.” However, the focus of this chapter is not on the lexical semantics of ...
9 One mechanism, two changes in Mandarin Chinese
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pp. 185-204
This chapter presents findings of syntactic changes that support the view that grammar is shaped through everyday language usage. Specifically, the study presents findings of two syntactic changes in the singular noun phrase pattern (hereafter, NP pattern)...
Notes
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pp. 205-218
References
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pp. 219-232
Index
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pp. 233-235
E-ISBN-13: 9789882205437
Print-ISBN-13: 9789622099647
Page Count: 248
Publication Year: 2009
