International Journal of Chinese Linguistics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017

This paper takes the string e5 khuan2 个款 (EK for short) as an ambiguous case to show the emergence of a grammatical function out of a lexical category. It examines the ambiguity of EK in conjunction with the analysis of its syntactic structure. It explores the collocates of EK including a range of matrix predicates and sentence-final particles. It pins down EK as a sensory evidential marker in semantic interpretation. Finally, it teases out the unique syntactic and semantic properties of EK in terms of the layered structure of sentence-final particles.

This paper discusses the syntax and semantics of -men and four types of phrases containing -men in Mandarin. I defend the view that -men should be analyzed as a plural morpheme as first argued in Li (1999) but argue against the analysis of positing -men in the D position or treating it as a definite determiner. It will be shown that definiteness is not inherent to -men and that -men is compatible with numerals and classifiers and should be in a position local to nouns. I propose an analysis of -men as an associative plural and explain the properties of the four types of expressions containing -men within a Neocarlsonian account of bare nominals. The formal account of the syntax and semantics of phrases containing -men advanced in this paper shows that it is not necessary to assume a functional category D that is always invisible in the grammar of Mandarin in order to account for the behaviors of its nominal arguments and argues for the lack of DP projections in Mandarin.

This paper investigates the factors involved in the adaptation of loanwords and how these factors influence each other through a case study of three systems of transcription for Mandarin loanwords in Korean. The result of this study demonstrates that perception, phonology, and source-language orthography are all important factors in the three systems of transcription. This study provides empirical evidence to what causes speakers of the same native language – in our case, Korean – to propose different adapted forms for the same source input and argues that variation in adaption patterns can be viewed as results of different constraints and different rankings of the same constraints. Last, this study invites researchers to pay more attention to the role of borrowers in the hope of building a more robust model of loanword adaptation.

This study illustrates how three level tones might have developed diachronically by comparing two synchronic Mandarin dialects. In Standard Mandarin (SM), the four lexical tones are denoted as /H, LH, L, HL/ or /H, R, L, F/ phonologically. However, based on evidence from two acoustic experiments, this study proposes that the four lexical tones in Taiwan Mandarin (TM) should be analyzed as /H, M, L, HM/, with /H, HM/ in a high register and /M, L/ in a low register. The proposed tonal structure can account for all the tone sandhi in TM using the framework of Optimality theory, and the register difference plays an important role in the analyses. Also, the new TM tonal representation has an advantage in explaining the absence of the SM Tone 2 Sandhi. The new tonal representations illuminate how pitch contour differences might have developed into structural tone changes.

文章提出一種重新看待早期漢語詞形韻律結構的新觀點並採納新的方法加以分析。與漢語從上古單音節詞伊始演變而來觀點不同，我們認為，承繼甲骨文語言而來的早期漢語實際是從遠古多音節詞語言發展而來，至商周乃至春秋戰國時代已經轉變為單音節詞為詞彙主體的語言。商周詞形韻律結構有 SS，CS，SC，MS，BW（雙音節、弱首音節、重首音節、單音節、雙詞音節）五類。MS是主體，BW初萌發，餘三類是遠古遺存，也是本文分析重點。我們嘗試用輕重韻律說明為什麼早期君王名難以釋讀，輕重韻律如何影響詞形結構變化以及對君王名的制約。