Zhenshi and Shizaishi in Taiwan Mandarin: Intensification and Lexicalization

[[abstract]]This study explores the lexicalization of zhenshi and shizaishi. They originate as a fusion of an adverb (zhen(de) and shizai respectively) and the copula/focus marker (shi), and further develop an idiomatic meaning through discourse interaction. Three types of zhen(de) and shizai are first identified: descriptive, expressive, and interactive. Descriptive zhen(de) denotes something as real/true. Expressive zhen(de) intensifies the speaker’s advocacy about a statement. Interactive zhende typically appears in two constructions: shuozhende emphasizes the speaker’s seriousness about a subsequent utterance, signaling that the following speech may sound less believable or worthy of the addressee’s extra attention; zhende followed by a particle demonstrates various interpersonal functions like questioning or responding. On the other hand, descriptive shizai denotes something as strong and full of content, which can metaphorically and metonymically represent the quality of being reliable and realistic. Expressive shizai, similar to expressive zhen(de), also emphasizes the speaker’s support for a statement. Finally, interactive shizai typically appears in the construction shuoshizaide, which, like its English equivalent, frankly, signals an unexpected or non-preferential upcoming utterance. Of all the polysemous meanings of zhen(de) and shizai, the expressive meaning is most pertinent to the lexicalization of zhenshi and shizaishi. They start out as a fusion of an adverb, zhen and shizai respectively, and the copula/focus marker, shi, which is a common morphological trend in Modern Mandarin. The compositional meaning of the fused forms, zhenshi and shizaishi, is similar to the expressive zhen and shizai, i.e. to intensify a statement, typically an evaluation. However, the speech carrying the evaluation is often truncated due to limitation on cognitive processing and avoidance of social impropriety. Still, with the frequent co-occurrence of zhenshi/shizaishi and an evaluative speech, the speaker’s evaluative intent can be readily inferred by the addressee through metonymy. The evaluative meaning of zhenshi is also supported by another evaluative expression zhenshide. In exploring the lexicalization of zhenshi and shizaishi, this study thus illustrates the emergent nature of grammar/lexicon by showing how the interaction among language (syntagmatic co-occurrence), culture (communicative politeness), and cognition (pragmatic inference) contributes to the emergence of novel lexical items.

Subjectivity and Nominal Property Concepts in Mandarin Chinese

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Department of Linguistics, 202

Morphological productivity in Chinese [A N]: A corpus-based study

Master'sMASTER OF ART

Chinese DE constructions in secondary predication: Historical and typological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role

Lability of Verbs and the Change-of-State Construction in Chinese.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

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

Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation

This innovative collection showcases the importance of the relationship between translation and experience in premodern science, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of knowledge transfer across premodern time and space. The volume considers experience as a tool and object of science in the premodern world, using this idea as a jumping-off point from which to view translation as a process of interaction between diff erent epistemic domains. The book is structured around four dimensions of translation—between terms within and across languages; across sciences and scientific norms; between verbal and visual systems; and through the expertise of practitioners and translators—which raise key questions on what constituted experience of the natural world in the premodern area and the impact of translation processes and agents in shaping experience. Providing a wide-ranging global account of historical studies on the travel and translation of experience in the premodern world, this book will be of interest to scholars in history, the history of translation, and the history and philosophy of science

“SOLEMN PROGRESS”: MODERNISM, SOCIAL CONSTITUTION, AND COSMIC LIFE

This dissertation examines how modernist writers engaged with various forms of civic virtue even as they considered how still broader affective investments might sustain a common humanity. Employing a method similar to what Susan Stanford Friedman has termed “cultural parataxis” (the use of global juxtapositions to highlight cross-cultural ramifications of modernist texts), it illuminates affinities and divergences in works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lin Yutang, and Rabindranath Tagore to uncover a shared attentiveness, on the part of writers in the East and the West, to the implications of collective modes of feeling for public life. Though writing from different sides of the colonial divide, the authors under discussion remained similarly vigilant about the ways in which patriotic sentiments could be marshaled for militant and self-interested purposes in the name of civic virtue. Instead of negating the significance of civic engagement, however, they sought to create alternative understandings of collective spirit that they believed would be nourishing for modern life. I argue that the re-imaginings of solidarity in these writers’ works involve two moves that are temporally divergent yet temperamentally complementary: a renewal of attention to older conceptions of civil society whose ethic was civilized rather than narrowly civic; and an extension of the domain of society to a cosmic realm of life beyond the purview of the political state. Focusing on the relation between shared cosmopolitan sensibilities and various imaginings of the cosmic in modernist literature across cultural boundaries, the project sheds light on aspects of collective experience that are structured (but not completely circumscribed) by economic models of globalization and opens up new avenues for thinking about the scope, content, and applicability of cosmopolitanism. Its ethico-aesthetically attuned approach, while attending to cultural particularities captured by these literary works, establishes deeper affinities between intellectual traditions in the East and the West