Syntax of Vietnamese Aspect

The aim of this thesis is two-fold: to develop an articulated Vietnamese clause structure in two syntactic domains: VP-external and VP-internal in the spirit of generative grammar, and to see how this functional architecture is supported empirically from the perspective of second language acquisition. To address theoretical issues, on the one hand, it brings together interesting semantic and syntactic contrasts of aspectual morphemes in Vietnamese, i.e., the distributional and interpretative independence of Vietnamese tense and aspect as well as the way they interact with other syntactic phenomenon such as negation, quantification and definiteness. On the other hand, it reveals to what extent the mechanisms that Vietnamese recruits to encode aspect are different from those employed in Indo- European languages and other areally-related languages, especially including Chinese. Based on a detailed semantic-syntactic investigation of Vietnamese aspect, the thesis sets out the properties that need to be acquired by Chinese learners. It distinguishes between those properties which are acquirable without difficulties and those that are ‘problematic’ in order to verify the proposed Vietnamese functional clause. It also sets out to validate some recent hypotheses in the realm of second language acquisition. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical approach of the thesis. Chapter 2 systematically reviews a set of semantic and syntactic studies on aspect that are relevant to the discussion. Chapter 3 lays out previous research on Vietnamese tense and aspect as points of departure for my proposals. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to an analysis of how tense and aspect are realized in Vietnamese both pre- and post-verbally. Chapter 6 provides a brief comparison between Vietnamese and Chinese aspectual systems, focusing on the particular properties investigated in the following chapter. Chapter 7 presents a set of experiments examining Chinese learners’ acquisition of Vietnamese aspect-related constructions, these shed light on current generativist hypotheses about second language acquisition. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis

Corpus-Based Research on Chinese Language and Linguistics

This volume collects papers presenting corpus-based research on Chinese language and linguistics, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The contributions cover different fields of linguistics, including syntax and pragmatics, semantics, morphology and the lexicon, sociolinguistics, and corpus building. There is now considerable emphasis on the reliability of linguistic data: the studies presented here are all grounded in the tenet that corpora, intended as collections of naturally occurring texts produced by a variety of speakers/writers, provide a more robust, statistically significant foundation for linguistic analysis. The volume explores not only the potential of using corpora as tools allowing access to authentic language material, but also the challenges involved in corpus interrogation, analysis, and building

Topics in Chinese syntax : word order in synchrony and diachrony.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN035550 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

A reevaluation of so-called passive constructions in ancient Chinese : from Pre-Qin to the Han dynasty

While there have been written many linguistic studies on the passive voice in Chinese, many aspects of this field of research have remained controversial, such as the emergence of various constructions, their exact syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features, as well as the question from which period onward we can talk about a “mature” passive (i.e., passive voice). Three main opinions are presented in current scholarship. Ma, in a pioneering work from 1898 (reprinted in 2007: 160), defined the Chinese passive construction as a construction with “a patient appearing in the subject position” without clearly defining the “subject” or discussing the construction (外动字之行，有施有受。受者居宾次，常也。如受者居主次，则为受动字，明其以受者为主也。). Much later, Gao 1949 (reprinted in 2011: 226-227) argued that none of the explanations that have been provided in scholarship so far validated the assumption that the constructions could be treated similarly to the passive voice found in many western languages (汉语具有动词功能的词，实在并没有施动和受动的分别), while other recent studies have labeled the Chinese structures that had overt syntactic markers as passive structures. In order to contribute to this fundamental and long-lasting scholarly debate, this comprehensive study provides a review of the diachronic development of the so-called Chinese passive from the pre-Qin era to the end of the Han dynasty. Part 1 reviews the studies of passive in Chinese and also introduces the definition of passive in a cross-linguistic perspective. Especially, some relevant terminology, in particular, “passive sense”, “passive voice”, “passive function” and “passive construction”, are distinguished in order to better understand the passive in Ancient Chinese. Meanwhile, three important factors that could trigger a passive interpretation in Ancient Chinese are introduced as a general background of this dissertation. Part 2 examines two types of notional passive (i.e., PV construction) in Ancient Chinese, i.e., Type 1 and Type 2. It is found that most notional passives were in fact the intransitive use of labile verbs (i.e., Type 1) that could only be interpreted as a passive depending on the context. Meanwhile, in some special contexts, a few verbs with strong transitive features are also found in the notional passive construction (i.e., Type 2), which is rarely observed cross-linguistically. Type 2 should be understood as a special situation of Type 1 in which the event expressed by the verb is not likely to occur spontaneously. Part 3 focuses on the diachronic development of the four lexical items traditionally regarded as “passive markers”: jian见, bei 被, wei 为and yu于, and concludes that all are ambiguous for both passive and non-passive interpretations, since a passive interpretation is determined by the context rather than by these markers themselves, which were also used in active sentences and could also be assembled to constitute new structures and variations. Therefore, it was concluded that there was no consistent syntactic marker that specifically expressed the passive voice in Ancient Chinese. Part 4 examines whether the ke construction was a passive construction in Archaic Chinese by reviewing the formation of the ke (and ke yi) constructions, as well as the nan (yi), yi (yi) and zu (yi) constructions. It was concluded that these were more likely to be interpreted as serial verb constructions with deontic modality and a generic reading with middle characteristics that possibly also expressed a passive meaning. However, it was concluded that ke, nan, yi and zu could not justifiably be defined as passive markers. Part 5 concludes that in Chinese it is important to differentiate between the passive voice and a passive sense. From a translation perspective, some so-called passive structures were found to express passive meanings and were translated as such into English and other languages. However, as the passive meaning appeared to be pragmatically rather than syntactically determined, none of the alleged passives in Ancient Chinese can be qualified as passive voice in accordance with a syntactic definition of passive. In general, the degree of grammaticalization of the passive markers in Archaic Chinese was quite low and they are better explained from a functional grammar viewpoint rather than a transformational generative grammar perspective

Four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of relative clauses: a permutation analysis

We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. “Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?”). Two RC types, classifier (CL) and ge3 RCs, were tested in a between-participants design. The two RC types differ in their syntactic analyses and frequency of occurrence, providing an important point of comparison for theories of RC acquisition and processing. A permutation analysis showed that the two structures were processed differently: CL RCs showed a significant object-over-subject advantage, whereas ge3 RCs showed the opposite effect. This study shows that children can have different preferences even for two very similar RC structures within the same language, suggesting that syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the unique features of particular constructions both within and across different linguistic typologies. CopyrightDepartment of Chinese and Bilingual Studies2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalbcr

Explanation in typology

This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations

The formation of Chinese multi-word constructions: evidence from the processing and production of Chinese native speakers

In this thesis, the formations of two multi-word constructions in Chinese—the V-O verb copy constructions (VCC) and the disyllabic root-compound words (DSC)—are re-examined based on the evidence from native speakers’ processing and production. The purpose of this study is to fill an empirical gap from the perspective of theoretical postulations for the two constructions, namely, the Copy Merge Theory of Movement under the generative framework, and the ‘pre-stored templates’ and ‘emergence model’ assumed by the constructionist framework. Different from previous studies, the experimental approach is used as an alternative approach in my thesis. In examining the VCCs, a fill-in-the-blank task elicited native speakers’ responses to two blank conditions of the VCC context; a self-paced reading task compared native speakers’ reaction times to the VCC and non-VCC chunks of controlled frequencies. The overall findings confirm that native speakers perceive the VCCs the same way as they are derived according to the syntactic operations; the results also reveal that there may be a length constraint for the productivity of the ‘pre-stored templates’. In the investigation of the headedness structures of the DSCs, native speakers’ coinages were elicited and compared to the generalizations drawn on the basis of the textual materials. The results reveal that headed forms (as opposed to non-headed forms) are the prevalent structures in Chinese language as well as in Chinese speakers’ mental representations. This finding supports the language acquisition model put forward by emergent grammar, which assumes a correlation between inputs and outputs

Statistical Measures for Usage‐Based Linguistics

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111781/1/lang12119.pd

Postlexical prosody and the prosody-syntax interface

Synopsis: This book is an investigation into aspects of prosody, intonation and the prosody-syntax interface in Totoli, an endangered Austronesian language. With a strongly data-driven approach, the study integrates a combination of experimental evidence from both production and perception with corpus-based evidence through descriptive and inferential statistics. The study takes the prime structuring unit of speech – the Intonation Unit – as its principal unit of investigation. It presents a thorough description of the IU, develops an intonational model of it, and investigates the syntactic units it contains. The author argues that the data is best analysed by assuming recursive embedding of Intonation Units into Compound Intonation Units. This research represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the nature of prosodic systems found in the languages of the region and in intonational systems in general. It is one of the few investigations into the intonation of Austronesian languages and its analytical proposals are relevant both to prosodic theory and to phonological typology