Language and Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 4, 2018

The present paper presents a detailed description of the Associated Motion system of Classical Manchu, on the basis of original texts from the 17–18th centuries. It shows that despite superficial similarities, Classical Manchu differs in many ways from previously described AM systems only comprising translocative vs. cislocative markers, such as that of Japhug. This paper provides a basic framework for further research on the typology of simple AM systems.

Recurrent word sequences, referred to as “lexical bundles”, may be structurally incomplete, but they serve important communicative functions. Despite the essential roles of lexical bundles in discourse, many methodological issues have been raised in the process of identifying lexical bundles, which is generally frequency-based. The present study identifies three-word and four-word bundles in Chinese conversation and news, and efforts are made to respond to methodological challenges encountered in previous studies. We employ a more sensitive dispersion measure, DP, and an internal association measure, G, which help filter out high-frequency word sequences with no identifiable function and reduce the workload of further manual interventions. An exploratory data analysis is then conducted to compare the distributional patterns of lexical bundles in Chinese conversation and news. In Chinese, both the type number and the density of lexical bundles are higher in conversation than in news. This appears to be a strong cross-linguistic tendency that reflects the real-time pressure speakers face in spontaneous speech. The exploratory data analysis also shows that the elements in Chinese bundles are closely associated with each other. This suggests that lexical bundles are useful phrasal units in Chinese discourse, and thus invites further investigations of how lexical bundles are used in Chinese.

This paper investigates metaphor in Hakka proverbs by examining a corpus of 933 couplets based on a refined analytic framework from Lakoff & Turner (1989). For the source domain, the being of the state of affairs and the rhetorical relations of the two chunks are identified. For the target domain, the projected theme and the connotative tendency are examined. The results show that source domains significantly correlate with the rhetorical relations and target domains, respectively. Four metaphorical mapping mechanisms based on the generic is specific metaphor are proposed for the operation of the global construal. A mirror image mapping is demonstrated: whole-for-part metonymy in the source domain and part-for-whole metonymy in the target domain. Both the evoked knowledge schemas, encompassing real-life Hakka folk experiences, and the projected themes, including family values, individual characters, and evaluations or standards of life, are found to be culturally constrained. A coalescence of linguistic, cultural, and affective forces is claimed to represent the metaphors in Hakka proverbs. The study contributes to a better understanding of metaphors in proverbs by establishing a solid ground from their linguistic and cultural features, and to expanding the conceptual metaphor theory by building the conceptual universality with specific cultural information.

This article aims to reconstruct the word “west” in Old Chinese phonology. In previous studies, since there was no sufficient evidence besides Chinese dialects, phonetic compounds, and phonetic loans, most scholars reconstructed its onset as *s-. One of the oldest dictionaries, Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字, includes two other written forms of 西 xī “west,” 卥 (Gǔwén 古文) and 卤 (Zhòuwén 籀文). This paper re-examines the reconstruction of the word 西 xī “west” and investigates the word 訊 xùn “to interrogate” seen in excavated documents. According to the Shuōwén, 訊 xùn also had another written form (), which has the old form of 西 xī (卥). In other words, 西 xī and 訊 xùn must have had Xiéshēng connections (諧聲關係) at the time. Based on the resources from excavated documents such as oracle bone inscriptions and bronze scripts, 訊 xùn credibly has the character 人 rén as the phonetic element. This implies that 訊 xùn should have had the onset *sn- at the time; hence, it is concluded that the word “west” also had the onset *snˤ- in Old Chinese as well.

The present study examines the diachronic development of the Japanese discourse marker dakara ‘so’ from the perspective of grammaticalization with a special focus on the role of discursive strategy in its semantic-pragmatic meaning change. Stemming from the adverbial phrase soredakara ‘because it is so’, dakara originally emerged as a causal connective that introduces a consequence. Subsequently, it gained several non-causal uses, i.e. the point-making use that refers back to what has been said or inferable in the discourse to stress the point that the speaker has been trying to make, the point-clarification use that points out that the preceding interlocutor’s statements need more elaboration, and the point-denying use that indicates the speaker’s opposition to the interlocutor’s claim. Among the new non-causal uses, it is found that the point-making use emerged from the retrospective use of causality as a result of employing the discourse strategy of justification in argumentative discourse, while the point-clarification and the point-denying uses arose due to its use as a device for delaying disagreement. It is argued that these new uses developed because the expression was repeatedly used for these two discourse strategies and over time the readings associated with these contexts became conventionalized and turned into the expression’s encoded meaning. This low-level generalization seems to better explain the process of grammaticalization than the high-level generalization of (inter)subjectivity for the developments of dakara.

This paper investigates the sluicing-like constructions (SLCs) in Isbukun Bunun, a language which always places its wh-words at the left-peripheral position, and it is argued that genuine sluicing is not available in this language. The evidence in favor of the pseudo-sluicing analysis draws on the behavior of how-phrases, the failure of implicit discourse anaphoric arguments and the absence of sloppy identity reading in Isbukun SLCs. These properties are otherwise hard to accommodate in a movement and deletion approach but rather follow from the view that SLCs in Isbukun Bunun are derived from independent syntactic operations including pro-drop.