Chinese linguistics

This article reviews corpus-based Chinese studies, both applied and theoretical, from the 1920s to the present. It will be shown that, while corpus-based Chinese studies have been gaining momentum for only the last couple of decades, the roots of Chinese corpus linguistics go all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. Today the bulk of corpus-based Chinese studies is oriented toward applied linguistics, with the compilation of frequency character/word lists and interlanguage Chinese studies being the most popular types of research. In addition to applied linguistic studies, this overview also highlights some innovative corpus studies on lexical and grammatical aspects of both classical and modern Chinese, as well as studies of sociolinguistic variation and discourse pragmatics. Overall, important groundwork in Chinese corpus linguistics is acknowledged and future directions are discussed.

Abstract. Continuous theoretical “tragedies” (rejection of the value of the isolating languages’ typology, phi-
losophers' lack of attention to linguistics, linguists' dislike for ontology) had so far not allowed to build a theory based
ascent from the typological description to the general processes of generation and perception and further – to the
ontology of Language & Being. It seems possible to connect three areas and to show how the description of an isolat-
ing language can provoke the creation of a holistic ontology in conjunction with the existential Heidegger’s second
period of philosophy, and also – “to overcome the contradictions” of his exegetes, by whom Being is opposed to
Language, and “Language – the house of being”is considered no more than a nice phrase. 
Keywords: chinese language, topic-comment, Heidegger's existential philosophy, Being, generation-
perception, existence, transcendence.

The designations of the orange fruit in Indo-European languages very often literally meant “apple from China”. Citrus species were known in the Chinese cultural area in the fifth century BCE and glossed in c.100 CE, but there is no basic colour term for orange in Modern Standard Mandarin. This colour category is psychologically salient, but it is still inseparable from a concrete object in the mind of a native speaker, and can therefore be defined as starting to become basic. This article also suggests modification of Berlin and Kay’s (1969: 6) first criterion for basicness in colour terms: applied to Chinese, a term should be monomorphemic and, moreover, monosyllabic – rather than just monolexemic – since almost every syllable is a morpheme in Chinese.

Content-based instruction provides second language learners instruction in subject matter and language, and is greatly valued, particularly in the language immersion context where a language other than students' first language is the vehicle for teaching school curriculum. Chinese immersion programs are one of the fastest growing areas of language education in American schools. There has been a paucity of empirical research examining pedagogies that integrate second language into subject-matter instruction within the US context, and the Chinese immersion teaching is also under researched. The study explores an in-service teacher's understanding and practice of content-based instruction in the Chinese immersion setting, and the data show the teacher's understanding and practice are strongly connected.

This article discusses the different analyses of Chinese
compounds put forth in recent years and presents both the new
classifi cation for Chinese compounding and the headedness principle proposed by Ceccagno & Basciano (2007). Abbreviation in Chinese is the result of the interface of two opposing tendencies in Chinese: recursion and condensation. The resulting new words are often disyllabic compounds. For many compounds formed through abbreviation the analysis of the surface
forms is somehow problematic, since at least one of the constituents is a truncated form of an underlying compound. Therefore, Ceccagno & Basciano (2007, 2009a, 2009b) propose to consider the features of the underlying compounds. This process of analysis is called “metacompounding” and the compounds analyzed in this way are called “metacompounds”. The
main focus of this article is precisely metacompounding, which proves to be an effective tool to analyzing these compounds because it prevents a misinterpretation of the meaning, the the lexical category, and/or the position of the head of the surface compound.

I Introduzione La lingua Xiang, Xiangyu 湘语, occupa una ruolo chiave tra le varietà dialettali del cinese standard data la sua natura di transizione tra gruppi linguistici settentrionali e gruppi linguistici meridionali. 1 Conseguentemente, la classificazione delle numerose

The history of dictionaries has much to tell us about the language and the culture of the past. The article provides historical and typological characteristics of the Chinese Erya, the most ancient explanatory dictionary in the world which has remained in its complete form till our time. The author of the article dwells on the analysis and description of such parameters as the time of compiling and the sources of the dictionary, coverage, the features of its macro-level structure and metalanguage.

This paper argues that long-standing problems in the analysis of Chinese, such as the question of word classes and grammatical relations, can be resolved, or actually done away with completely, if we take a constructionist approach in the analysis. This means the constructions are taken as basic, so we only need to look at the propositional functions of elements in the construction (referential, modifying, or predicative), and do not need to posit global categories such as word classes and grammatical relations.

【摘自】『中国文学研究』第42期、早稲田大学中国文学会、57−81頁、2016
【提要】本文以語法文獻為材料來探討西洋人研究漢語的進程。本研究將焦點集中於對結果補語的發現和梳理的過程。本文從18世紀到19世紀中期的語法書入手，分析其中所見的動詞分類學說。本文發現，英國傳教士艾約瑟（Edkins）第一次成功地把結果補語結構較有系統地歸納出來了。值得注意的是，他的成果不是從官話研究中得出來的，而是從方言研究，特別是上海方言的研究中得出來的。艾氏探討上海方言的結果補語時，主要繼承了兩種先行成果。一種是法國漢學家雷穆薩（Rémusat）的看法：補語結構的後項成分意思有所虛化，並且，前項動詞一般是及物性的，而後項則是不及物性動詞。另一種是法國學者巴讚（Bazin）和德國傳教士郭實獵（Gützlaff）的漢語詞語分類法。艾氏受到他們的啟發，脫離了“漢語＝單音節語言”這個根深蒂固的觀念而進一步
對雙音節動詞進行深入的分類，終於發現了“後一個動詞限定前一個動詞的意思”這個結構

This study specifically addresses the issues of teaching Chinese character writing. As the
students who are not native to Chinese encounter much difficulty in acquiring the writing system
for reading and writing, there is an urgent need to review and improve the teaching methods
applied at CFL institutions to better help the students to overcome the difficulty. Also, it is
evident from research(Luria,1973) that there is a link between reading comprehension of a
language and visual intelligence, hence it is imperative to clarify this aspect in Chinese language
and derive suggestive measures for its application for the improvement of teaching Chinese
characters. When the same methods of teaching are applied to the students having different
levels of intelligences, it makes the learning process easy for some students and hard for others.
There is an urgent need of revision of methods used for teaching Chinese characters as it doesn’t
address the ability of all the students.

Abstrak Kajian ini dijalankan bertujuan untuk meninjau penguasaan sebutan bahasa Jepun dalam kalangan pelajar Cina di sebuah institusi pengajian tinggi awam Malaysia. Seramai 40 orang pelajar Cina yang mengikuti Kursus Kemahiran Bahasa Jepun Tahap III telah dipilih sebagai responden kajian ini. Mereka merupakan pelajar Cina yang berlatar belakang bahasa Cina, iaitu berpendidikan di Sekolah Rendah Kebangsaan Cina ketika berada pada tahap sekolah rendah. Secara umumnya, pembelajaran bahasa Jepun dalam kalangan pelajar Cina dikatakan lebih mudah jika dibandingkan dengan pelajar bukan Cina. Ini kerana tulisan Kanji bahasa Jepun berasal dari tulisan aksara Cina, Hanzi (Wang, 1995). Malahan, sesetengah sebutan bahasa Jepun mirip dengan sebutan bahasa Cina sedangkan mereka berkongsi aksara Cina yang sama. Satu ujian menulis telah diberi kepada responden untuk menterjemahkan kata adjektif bahasa Inggeris kapada bahasa Cina dan bahasa Jepun. Untuk membanding sebutan kedua-dua bahasa Cina dan bahasa Jepun, responden dikehendaki menulis jawapan dalam sebutan 汉语拼音(Hànyǔ Pīnyīn) bagi bahasa Cina manakala sebutan ローマ字(Romaji) bagi bahasa Jepun. Dapatan kajian telah menunjukkan bahawa keputusan responden bagi menjawab dalam sebutan bahasa Jepun adalah lemah jika dibanding dengan menjawab dalam sebutan bahasa Cina. Untuk membuktikan sama ada terdapatnya perbezaan yang signifikan antara menjawab soalan dalam sebutan Cina dan sebutan Jepun, analisis Ujian T (Paired Sample T-Test) telah dijalankan. Setelah data kajian dianalisis dengan menggunakan Ujian T dalam program perisian SPSS, dapatan kajian telah menunjukkan bahawa terdapatnya perbezaan yang signifikan antara pengguasaan sebutan Cina dan sebutan Jepun. Dapatan kajian ini juga telah menunjukkkan bahawa pengetahuan bahasa Cina tidak membantu pelajar Cina dalam pembalajaran bahasa Jepun seperti yang dijangkakan. Malahan, perbezaan sebutan yang terdapat dalam kedua-dua bahasa tersebut telah menyumbang kepada permindahan negatif (negative transference) semasa mempelajari sebutan bahasa Jepun oleh pelajar Cina. Di sini terbuktilah teori Lado yang menegaskan bahawa "...unsur-unsur yang sama dengan bahasa natif akan menjadi mudah bagi pelajar, manakala unsur-unsur yang berbeza akan menyulitkan pelajar..." (1957: 2).

Sin dall'epoca dell'incontro tra la Cina e l'Occidente nel XIII secolo e fino ai primi decenni del XVIII, l'Italia detenne il primato sugli studi sinologici europei. Il culmine fu raggiunto tra la fine del XVI e l'inizio del XVII secolo, quando una gran quantità di informazioni sulla Cina raggiunse l'Europa e l'Italia grazie al lavoro dei missionari, specialmente gesuiti, che possono a buon diritto essere considerati i primi veri sinologi. 2 Negli anni successivi l'Italia perdette il suo primato in favore di altri Paesi quali la Francia, l'Olanda e l'Inghilterra, la cui presenza in Cina era decisamente più forte per ragioni di varia natura. Tuttavia, la Cina e la sua lingua continuarono a interessare e affascinare gli studiosi italiani, anche se coloro che all'inizio del XIX secolo volevano intraprenderne lo studio erano costretti ad andare a Parigi al Collège de France, 3 dove sin dal 1814 erano stati avviati corsi di cinese. La prima cattedra di sinologia era stata affidata ad Abel Rémusat (1788-1832), che aveva studiato in primo luogo medicina e poi il cinese da autodidatta. Non si era mai recato in Cina e le sue lezioni concernevano perlopiù la grammatica e la traduzione dei Classici. Alla sua morte, il successore al Collège fu il suo allievo Stanislas Julien (1799-1873), che divenne un sinologo molto noto in Europa, nonostante, come il suo maestro d'altronde, non fosse mai stato in Cina come il suo maestro. Uno dei primi a ottenere una borsa di studio per apprendere il cinese oltralpe fu il marchigiano Antelmo Severini (1828-1909), il quale a Parigi ebbe l'opportunità di studiare sia il cinese sia il giapponese con i più eminenti orientalisti del tempo. Una volta in Italia, egli divenne il primo docente universitario italiano di entrambe le lingue. 4 Nonostante sia principalmente ricordato e apprezzato come iamatologo, Severini dedicò numerosi studi alla cultura e alla lingua cinese, prendendo parte ad alcuni tra i più accesi dibattiti del suo tempo nati in seguito alla classificazione tipologica delle lingue, agli albori degli studi di linguistica comparativa. Dopo una breve introduzione sulla vita e le opere di Severini, nonché sul contesto in cui si trovò a lavorare, questo articolo sottolineerà il contributo del sinologo italiano agli studi sulla lingua cinese, offrendo una panoramica delle sue riflessioni in testi editi e inediti, concentrati principalmente negli anni Sessanta dell'Ottocento.

Recent sociolinguistic studies on style have focused much attention on the construction of social meaning in situated discursive practices. Despite a general recognition that the linguistic resources used are often already imbued with social meanings, little research has been done on what these meanings may be. Focusing on rhotacization, a sociolinguistic variable in Beijing Mandarin, this article explores its imbued social meanings and sociocultural associations. I demonstrate that rhotacization takes on semiotic saliency through co-occurrence with key Beijing cultural terms and frequent use in written representations of authentic Beijing-ness. Furthermore, this feature is associated with the 'Beijing Smooth Operator,' a salient male local character type, and is ideologically construed as reflecting its characterological attributes. The findings of this study shed light on the meaning potential of a linguistic variable, rhotacization in this case, which can enhance understanding of the possibilities and constraints for its use and meaning in new contexts.

The paper reflects some results of the study of the “Ji jiu pian” (“Quick access [to characters]”), which was compiled in the 1st century BC by Han dynasty official Shi You. “Ji jiu pian” is the earliest Chinese primer survived to the present day. Some issues of the “Ji jiu pian” history are
highlighted in this article. However, the main attention is focused on its text structure, formal and thematic division of the word list. The early Chinese wordbooks had multiple functions: recorded orthographic norms served as textbooks to teach basic literacy as well as scopes of
basic knowledge about the world which students had to learn. Such wordbooks can be considered as prototypes of the later encyclopedias. “Ji jiu pian” was compiled as a handbook for the members of the royal court retinue. Also, it could be used to teach children of the royal
family. Hence it became the textbook for children. “Ji jiu pian” represents the minimum set of the words and characters, which was required in everyday and household routine of the Han dynasty. The “Ji jiu pian” lexical items can be divided into three big parts: “Peoples’ names”,
“Things” and “Governing the Empire and its officials”. In its turn, the word list of the biggest part “Things” can be subdivided into 24 thematic groups. This part represents a semantic classification of the commonly-used words (domestic, household, industrial and environmental) which was founded by Shi You in the 1st century B.C.

在区分拼写相同的单词时，声调非常重要。伊博语和汉语都是声调语言，语言中有许多单词有完全相同的写法，但由于声调而发音不同。根据Flege(1995)的言语学习模型里提出，L1与L2语音范畴之间的知觉关系非常重要。因此，本文采用描述性的方法对汉语和伊博语的音标进行分析。目的是了解语调、音调、声调的意思与区别，了解汉语与尼日利亚伊博语的基本知识与字母系统，了解汉语与尼日利亚伊博语的声调性质，了解汉语与尼日利亚伊博语的声调规则和主要功能，了解汉语与尼日利亚伊博语的调值、调类、调型与调号的特点。调查结果发现汉语里的声调分四种：第1声（平声）、第2声（阳平）、第3声（上声）、第4声（去声），伊博有三个声调：高、低和平调。伊博语当中虽然有声调但是根本没有汉语中的第三声，所以经常把汉语第三声说成伊博语的高调。具体地说是受母语负迁移的影响。研究结果可以给尼日利亚学习者汉语声调教学提供可靠性的依据。
关键词：伊博语，汉语，声调，困难。

In the eyes of early modern European scholars, Chinese was commonly regarded as a “lacking” language: lacking its own grammatical tradition or “grammatics”; lacking the complex morphology of the classical European languages; even lacking its own “parts of speech” or word classes. In the late 19th century Ma Jianzhong created a grammatics for Chinese by adapting the categories of Latin grammar - and with a good understanding of the similarities and differences between the two languages - but the Chinese grammarians who followed him have struggled with the question of what might be common to all languages and what might be distinctive to Chinese. Ma saw a Chinese grammatics as a way to fill a gap in the country's literacy education, and this applied focus has been shared by most Chinese grammarians since, something which has tended to put restrictions on their description and theorising. A historical perspective is thus absolutely essential for understanding the practical and ideological problems Chinese grammatics continues to face, and can also throw light on the general challenge of extending “European grammar” to non-European languages.

This paper aims to study the Basic Locative Constructions (BLCs) in Cantonese and Shanghainese by using a standardized picture elicitation method. Results show that BLCs in both Cantonese and Shanghainese adopt 4 strategies: locative copular, locative inversion, postural verbs and resultative complements. The latter two strategies are less frequently used, if not unacceptable, in Mandarin BLCs. The results suggest that the position of Southern Sinitic languages differs quite substantially from Mandarin in spatial typology. Moreover, locative inversion and resultative complements are strategies previously unaccounted for in existing typological frameworks. This experimental work endeavours to further our understanding of Sinitic typology and the typology of spatial language in general.

Islam and Arabic were introduced into China beginning from the Tang Dynasty. Under the Yuan, within many Muslim communities throughout the country Persian became an important language.  Even in the 19th century the mullahs in Beijing and probably in other regions preserved in the mosques and could read Persian texts. In their everyday speech and in the liturgical language the Hui still use not only Arabic, but also Persian loanwords and employ Persian letters in the Xiaojing Arabographic writing system.
Key words:  Muslims Hui, language contacts, Silk Road, Zhongyuan dialects, Lan-Yin dialects, Dungan, Persian

Relative clause (RC) structures are productive and complex in Chinese. While second language acquisition
studies of RCs in English has a long tradition, it is only in recent years that the Chinese as a second/foreign
language researchers started to pay close attention to the comparative difficulties of different types of Chinese
RCs for learners. A well-known markedness generalization regarding the RC structure is the Noun Phrase Accessibility
Hierarchy (AH), and its implications in second language acquisition have been well-attested in English
and other postnominal RCs. This research tests if Chinese as a foreign language learners’ production ease of
different RC types adheres to the order of the AH, and if such markedness is reflected in RC-forming strategies
in learners’ interlanguage. Learners in a written sentence combination task produced more target-like subject
and direct object RCs than indirect object and object of preposition RCs. Further evidence for a subject RC
preference was found in error analysis. Meanwhile, learners used gap and pronoun strategies within the AH
constraint, indicating that their interlanguage grammar is comparable to that of natural languages. We conclude
that the implicational generalization of the AH holds true in second language (L2) Chinese.

Previous studies suggest that writing helps reading development in Chinese in both first and second language settings by enabling higher‐quality orthographic representation of the characters. This study investigated the comparative effectiveness of reading, animation, and writing in developing foreign language learners’ orthographic
knowledge of Chinese and found that, for learners with existing orthographic knowledge, the three learning conditions facilitated character learning in different ways: Writing and animation both led to better form recognition, while reading produced superior meaning and sound recalls. In addition, the effect of animation in meaning recall was also better than writing. In developing the skill of reproducing characters from memory, writing was superior. Implications for the teaching and learning of Chinese characters are offered.

Little is known about the history of Chinese dialects. Major dialect groups were identified long ago using various
traditional criteria, such as tonal and segmental development from their presumed common ancestor; however,
scholarly agreement about their detailed development is largely lacking. At the core of the problem lies the role
that language contact played in the history of Chinese. Unlike in the case of other language families, the Chinese
dialects never really separated into distinct, independent languages, but kept evolving in close contact to each
other. As a result, it is hard to tell whether traits shared among the dialects have been inherited or borrowed. Recent
network approaches from a biological perspective could show a way out of this dilemma, since they were specifically designed to handle vertical and horizontal aspects in bacterial evolution, and the first pilot studies in historical linguistics have reported promising results. In this paper, a case study on the application of network approaches
in Chinese historical linguistics is presented. Based on a dataset of 200 basic items translated into 23 Chinese dialect varieties, competing proposals for Chinese dialect classification are compared and tested for general plausibility. The results of the comparison show that network approaches are a useful supplement for quantitative and
qualitative approaches in Chinese historical linguistics. In order to reach their full potential, however, the underlying evolutionary models need to be more closely adapted to linguistic needs, and additional evidence, like geographic information, needs to be taken into account. (This article is in English.)

This article explores the history of the Roman alphabet in the late Qing empire (1637–1912). Following the opening of treaty ports to Western capital in the mid-nineteenth century, missionaries and diplomats who entered the Qing territories began to romanize various local languages. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than 20 languages had been romanized, which had an indelible impact on the politics of language and writing in China in the following decades. This article examines the
origins of romanization in nineteenth-century China by situating it within a larger history of capitalism, imperialism, and the industrial printing press. Exploring the ideological and material dimensions of alphabetization, it contends that the Roman alphabet imposed a new epistemology of writing on China, which generated novel contradictions regarding language politics––contradictions that are still extant today.

This paper examines the life-cycle of versatile nominalizers in Chinese, with special attention to how they develop into attitudinal stance markers. Based on cross-dialectal and diachronic data, we first identify a wide range of extended uses of nominalization constructions within the Sinitic language family, among them relativizing and subordinating uses, then trace how these dependent nominalization constructions are reanalyzed as independent finite structures. Our analysis reveals a series of semantic and syntactic scope expansions that paves the way for nominalization [ 2 9 _ T D $ D I F F ] constructions to be extended from referential uses to attitudinal uses. Our findings highlight the robustness of an (inter)subjectification process whereby nominalizers often combine with other particles at the right periphery to form complex sentence final mood particles, which have valuable implications for cartographic studies in diachronic syntax and also for diachronic pragmatics studies that focus on the interface between grammar and discourse-not only for Chinese, but for other languages with attitudinal nominalizers as well.

Metaphorical or allegorical in nature and deeply embedded in Chinese culture, yànyǔ 諺語 ‘proverbs’ are fundamentally a colloquial form of idiomatic expressions. Yànyǔ consist of complete sentences with different types of predicate; some yànyǔs have structural or lexical variants and stylistic synonyms.

Introduction

The International Conference on Bilingualism: Language and Heritage is an inaugural conference that officially launches the newly established University of Cambridge - Chinese University of Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism (JLB). We aim to provide an international forum to promote and disseminate research in bilingualism across the lifespan from infancy to early childhood and adulthood with a focus on the acquisition of Chinese across linguistically diverse bilingual and multilingual contexts. The theme of the conference features bilingualism through the lens of the intricate relationship of language and heritage, in particular, the acquisition of language as a way to preserve and maintain a speaker and community's heritage and the challenges posed to language learners, researchers and educators.

The conference also features two panels that will be of interest to a wide spectrum of audience from diverse disciplines as well as the general public. The panels bring together researchers and practitioners from different countries including Australia, UK, USA, Hong Kong and Singapore to give an international perspective on issues in nurturing bilingualism in early childhood and heritage bilingualism across diverse contexts.


Panel I: Bilingualism in early childhood education: research and practice

This panel focuses on issues in early childhood bilingualism and education, with the guiding assumption that research and practice can mutually inform each other. Panelists will highlight the importance of infant and child bilingualism research using methods from psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience and explore implications for developing programs and for practitioners in the classroom. The panel will be of interest to educators and language professionals concerned with bilingualism research and best practices in the local and international communities.
Panel II: Heritage bilingualism, education and society

This panel focuses on Chinese as a heritage language in overseas communities where English is the language of the community. As the learning and teaching of heritage Chinese has grown rapidly in recent years across many countries, the speakers will address issues in developing education programs for school age children and adult learners in diverse learning contexts. A key issue to be discussed is how knowledge of Chinese as a heritage language can be nurtured in English-dominant environments and how heritage bilingualism is vital to preserving the heritage and identity of the speaker.
Call for Abstracts (Poster Presentations)

We are inviting abstract submissions for poster presentations at the Conference. Submissions are invited on any of the following topics:

childhood bilingualism and multilingualism
second language acquisition
third language acquisition
heritage bilingualism
language contact and bilingualism
language shift and maintenance
bilingual education
bilingual language policy


Submission guidelines:

All abstracts must be submitted in pdf format via the online abstract submission portal.
Abstracts are limited to 300-400 words, including references and 3 keywords, not exceeding one A4 page.
Font size is 12 point Times New Roman font, single-lined, margins set to 2.54cm (1 inch) all around.



Important dates:

Submission deadline: 16 October, 2017
Notification of acceptance: 30 October, 2017



Keynote Speakers

Boping Yuan
University of Cambridge

Margaret Deuchar
University of Cambridge

Esuna Dugarova
United Nations

Audrey Li
University of Southern California

Yongcan Liu
University of Cambridge

Gigi Luk
Harvard University

Maria Polinsky
University of Maryland

Virginia Yip
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Yang Zhao
Peking University







Invited Speakers

Angel Chan
Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Xiangjun Deng
Shenzhen University

Ting Ding
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Mary Erbaugh
University of Oregon

Yanyu Guo
University of Cambridge

Xuhui Hu
Peking University

Yinglin Ji
Shenzhen University

Elaine Lau
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Diana Lee
University of Hong Kong

Connie Lum
NTUC First Campus, Singapore

Ziyin Mai
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Peggy Mok
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ruying Qi
Western Sydney University

Pei Pei Setoh
Nanyang Technological University

Rebecca Starr
National University of Singapore

Ai Ling Thian
NTUC First Campus, Singapore

Lucy Zhao
University of Sheffield







Invited Moderator

Stephen Matthews
University of Hong Kong







Registration

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Venues and Transportation

The conference will be held at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

18 December, 2017: 
Inauguration ceremony
Cho Yiu Conference Hall

Invited Talks
Lecture Theatre 5, Lee Shau Kee Building

19 December, 2017:
Panels
Lecture Theatre 5, Lee Shau Kee Building

В работе рассматривается, как современные китайские поэты структурируют свои произведения в соответствии с их представлениями о роли нормативного и разговорного в поэзии. Язык китайского стиха конца XX – начала XXI вв. инкорпорирует элементы классического языка вэньянь, настоящей разговорной нормы, заимствования из тополектов и др. элементы. Это иллюстрирует полиморфную природу языкового стандарта современной китайской поэзии, который создаёт напряжение, существующее между реальной языковой практикой стиха и тем идеализированным образом языковой реальности, ориентированной на точное воспроизведение в нём разговорной речи, который проецируется в теоретических и критических работах самих авторов.

"In post-World War II Singapore, the vast majority of Singapore’s population communicated using Chinese, forming a distinct social, cultural and political sphere that existed autonomously from, but occasionally interlinked with, the dominant English language world of the colonial elite. The historian needs to access this Chinese domain to fully understand the transformations taking place in Singapore between 1945 and 1963. A study of the Chinese newspapers offers insight into this domain in several ways. Firstly, how important events were reported affected public perception. Secondly, the opinions and views expressed in the newspapers’ editorials and articles were influential in Chinese society, and the public responded in various literary forms. The back pages of the newspapers formed a space for public debate. Thirdly, the newspapers existed as
cultural artefacts. Standing at the nexus of the political, cultural, and social spheres, it was on the pages of the newspapers that many new ideas were put forward, and traditional concepts were contested. The newspapers acted as mediators between the old and the new, developing the new concepts and language of decolonization and independence. The evolution of Chinese thought in Singapore can be traced within the pages of the newspapers."

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

In Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, much has been done in reconstructing the sound system of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and in reconstructing a large number of cognate lexical items assumed to have been part of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, and there has been considerable work in terms of what morphology can or cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Sino-Tibetan, but it is much harder to say that two syntactic patterns are cognate than to say that two morphological paradigms or particular words are cognate. Within the family we find that modern Sinitic varieties vary from most of the Tibeto-Burman languages in terms of basic clause structure. In this paper we look at information structure in Old Chinese to attempt to find a directionality to the changes found in the long period we think of as Old Chinese, and to look back to the starting point of those changes to see what the clause structure of the precursor of Old Chinese might have been. As it turns out to be more similar to the dominant patterns of Tibeto-Burman languages, it allows us to hypothesize what the patterns were in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

Patterns of language choice for the second-generation Chinese bilinguals in Italy

As the Chinese migrated community settles down in Italy, a new generation formed by individuals who where born in Italy or arrived at an early age, gradually develops a language usage that differs both from their parents and their Italian peers. The three linguistic varieties that constitute their speech repertoire, Italian, Putonghua and dialect, are selected in their daily speech according to a number of factors. One of the many aspects studied in contact linguistics, language choice, as Romaine (1984:37) points out, is in fact rule governed:  “people are constrained by the expressive resources available in the language(s) to which they have access and by the conventions which apply to their use”.
Sociolinguistics provides many means to define language choice in multilingual settings, such as domain analysis (Fishman, 1965) and network analysis (Milroy 1980). I attempt to design an overview of language choice by the Chinese second generation in Italy, taking advantage of such instruments on a corpus gathered from a 55 questions questionnaire submitted to 78 students of Chinese origin in a community school of Putonghua in Rome. The questions focus on five areas: linguistic repertoire and language dominance, language use throughout domains, social networking, ethnolinguistic group enclosure and codeswitching.
The results presented here deal mainly with repertoire and dominance. The findings show how the dominant variety in the subjects’ repertoire changes according to the point of view we adopt to consider their language use. Due to the low proficiency in Italian, specific of the first generation Chinese in Italy (Ceccagno 2002), when asked which is the very first language they learned, most of the subjects, including the Italy born, picks one of the 2 Chinese varieties. On the other hand when asked which one is the language they feel they speak more fluently, the answer for half of the respondents is Italian, while about one fourth feels they speak Italian and Chinese with the same fluency. Finally another set of questions shows how Italian is also the language used most frequently on a daily basis and that it is also the favoured choice in communicating with Chinese peers, followed by Putonghua, which is otherwise almost completely absent in the exchanges with the parents. Overall, dialect is to be considered the dominant variety in the diachronic perspective, while Italian turns to be the dominant variety when we consider fluency and frequency of usage. While dialect keeps being the favoured choice in the parental domain, Italian is the language of the school and of peer networking, where it shares the domain along with Putonghua. This way the latter appears to be the only choice that is marked both from the ethnic and the intergenerational point of view.
The description of patterns of language choice constitutes the first step for any research aimed to detect the process of language shift or maintenance that this segment of the Chinese community will undergo in the near future.