Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017

The role of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s development remains a matter of debate. Some researchers have proposed that simultaneous bilingual learners develop the linguistic systems of two languages in the same way as matched monolingual children do. Other researchers have argued that bilingual children show different developmental pathways. This study investigates cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of relative clauses by English-Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore. The elicitation task included narration and interview tasks. Thirty-six primary school students aged 6 to 11 years completed the task in both English and Mandarin. The results reveal that the number of relative clauses increased with age in both languages. Participants had a preference for subject relatives over object relatives. The most frequent error type in Mandarin involves postnominal relative clauses, which have not been reported in monolingual children in the literature and thus can be treated as evidence of transfer from English. The findings of this study provide evidence for cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s speech.

This paper examines the process of Mandarinization in Singapore, and the effects of this process on the construction of Chinese ethnicity in Singapore. It does this through an analysis of official government speeches, followed by a questionnaire study examining the beliefs and attitudes of Chinese Singaporeans toward three varieties of Mandarin-Chinese, as well as Chinese “dialects” and English. The discourse analysis reveals an underlying assertion of a primordial relationship between Mandarin-Chinese and Chinese ethnicity. This, however, is not reflected in the beliefs of Chinese Singaporeans, who value Mandarin-Chinese for mainly instrumental reasons, and associated with a foreign standard. Chinese ethnicity in Singapore is instead constructed through a combination of Mandarin-Chinese, “dialects” and English. Ultimately, such a discrepancy results from Mandrinization’s dependence on an oversimplified understanding of language and ethnicity in Singapore.

Although much has been written about the differences between written and conversational discourses, less work has been done on how these two discourse types differ in terms of chunking patterns. This study investigates the different meanings and chunking patterns two words have in Mandarin written and conversational discourses. To overcome the problem of comparability between written and conversational corpora, instead of using a single word, I use two near-synonymous Mandarin words, zhihou and yihou, both of which mean roughly ‘after’ or ‘later,’ and compare their meaning and chunking patterns in written and spoken corpora. The investigation regarding semantic distinctions revealed that in both writing and conversation, zhihou favors past and yihou favors future, and that in writing but not in conversation zhihou is more often used with immediate high transitivity actions and causal relations, whereas yihou is more often used with low transitivity states. Regarding chunking patterns, whereas conversation preserves different stages of chunking, written discourse mainly has the final clear-cut stage. This study demonstrates the importance of grounding grammatical investigations on discourse types and of the possible usefulness of using near-synonymous words or grammatical constructions as a way of getting round the problem of comparability.

After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, rúguǒ and zhǐyào (both translatable as ‘if’), from a syntactic and a cognitive perspective. We examine their use in narrative and informative texts along four parameters: clause order, position of the connective within the clause, domain, and counterfactuality. For all parameters, the two connectives displayed robust profiles across genres. Both connectives preferred an antecedent-consequent clause order. They displayed flexibility in their position, behaving like adverbs, with rúguǒ showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than zhǐyào. In terms of domains, zhǐyào has a stronger preference for content conditionals than rúguǒ, which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only rúguǒ was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with ‘if’, but zhǐyào also matches ‘so/as long as’.

After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, rúguǒ and zhǐyào (both translatable as ‘if’), from a syntactic and a cognitive perspective. We examine their use in narrative and informative texts along four parameters: clause order, position of the connective within the clause, domain, and counterfactuality. For all parameters, the two connectives displayed robust profiles across genres. Both connectives preferred an antecedent-consequent clause order. They displayed flexibility in their position, behaving like adverbs, with rúguǒ showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than zhǐyào. In terms of domains, zhǐyào has a stronger preference for content conditionals than rúguǒ, which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only rúguǒ was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with ‘if’, but zhǐyào also matches ‘so/as long as’.